The Brexit thread

[seemslikeadream]

Ireland urges Britons to stop applying for Irish passports after Brexit
Post offices and consular services have seen a record spike in Irish passport applications

[Sounder]

tapitsbo wrote..

Corbyn on the other hand has been ruthlessly attacked since day 1, including hit pieces from the sorts of "antifa" mailing lists that get spammed here. You guys can make up your own minds about why this is the case, I suppose.

Could it be that 'antifa' are merely useful idiots doing the bidding of and spreading flack, in service to imperial and corporatist power?

By all means AD, cover us in bullshit.

[SonicG]

Most people have no idea that EU ministers (who are elected) have NO power to pass laws -- just to propose them; and that the laws are DECIDED by a group of unelected, non-transparently assessed diplomats, with close ties to lobbyists for special interests. I myself didn't know this until I was on a panel with a Portuguese EU minister who explained that he has and his colleagues have no powers to get laws passed, just to propose them. The real deciders are these nameless, nontransparent diplomats.

Thanks for some real context there Nordic.

Similar mechanisms are involved in all global trade agreements...More in the form of business-aligned technocrats being given all kinds of power over regulations, commerce and legal battles, especially patents. It is a nice double bind: everyone wants to applaud even a brief illusion of "sovereignty" but the illusion needs to be peeled back even more...The "overwhelming amount" of EC regulations are merely the regulations created by the UN and would still have to be followed anyhow if you want to trade goods internationally. ISO is also another form of the technocratic one-world government that many do not seem to realize is already here.

[stefano]

I woke up thinking of this...



Would you like to see Britannia rule again, my friend?
All you need to do is follow the worms
Would you like to send our coloured cousins home again, my friend?
All you need to do is follow the worms

[backtoiam]

Thanx Harvey you just enriched my life. That is cool. I also loved your painting of the bee you showed me. Where is that bee pic I want to save it?

Steve Bell on Tory leadership after the EU referendum

Couldn't resist this also by Enguerrand Quarton for it's (possibly unconscious) embedded subtexts. Beautiful.

[stefano]

This is a good column, sort of Alice Miller-y:

Am I saying, then, that David Cameron, and the majority of our ruling elite, were damaged by boarding?

It's complex. My studies show that children survive boarding by cutting off their feelings and constructing a defensively organised self that severely limits their later lives. Cameron, Boris Johnson, Jeremy Hunt, Andrew Mitchell, Oliver Letwin et al tick all the boxes for being boarding-school survivors. For socially privileged children are forced into a deal not of their choosing, where a normal family-based childhood is traded for the hothousing of entitlement. Prematurely separated from home and family, from love and touch, they must speedily reinvent themselves as self-reliant pseudo-adults.

Paradoxically, they then struggle to properly mature, since the child who was not allowed to grow up organically gets stranded, as it were, inside them. In consequence, an abandoned child complex within such adults ends up running the show. This is why many British politicians appear so boyish. They are also reluctant to open their ranks to women, who are strangers to them and unconsciously held responsible for their abandonment by their mothers. With about two-thirds of the current cabinet from such a background, the political implications of this syndrome are huge – because it's the children inside the men running the country who are effectively in charge.

[SonicG]

Just started reading V for Vendetta for the first time, now wondering what if any insight it will offer...I do know that the fascist leader is an avowed virgin and rules in union with the mainframe computer...So I suppose that ties into the rejection of the feminine on the part of these man-childs...

[American Dream]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... -terrorism

Ignored by the authorities, emboldened by Brexit, Europe’s far right is surging

Raffaello Pantucci


A ’Poles against migrants’ rally in Warsaw. ‘There is a danger that an already polarised political environment will become even more broken.’

The result of Britain’s referendum on EU membership has strengthened far-right activism across Europe. In the UK there have been reports of public racist abuse, while far-right-leaning parties across the continent have taken advantage of the situation to call for their own referendums. There is a danger that an already polarised political environment will become even more broken with some individuals choosing a path to violence in response.

Extreme rightwing terrorism has been a growing problem in Europe for some time. A recent study by a consortium led by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) highlighted that when looking at the phenomenon of “lone actor” terrorism in particular (terrorist acts conducted by individuals without any clear direction from an outside group), the extreme right wing was responsible for as many as Islamist extremists. And not all were random one-off killers – Anders Breivik was able to butcher 77 people in a murderous rampage in Norway. What was particularly worrying was the fact that these individuals sat at the far end of a spectrum of extremists that included elements closer to the mainstream.

Despite an apparent increase in extreme rightwing violence, there has been less attention paid to it by authorities
In the runup to conducting his act of terrorism, Breivik claimed to have attended protests organised by the English Defence League (EDL), a group he admired for its stand against what he perceived as invading Muslim hordes in Europe. Founded in the UK in response to a perceived refusal by authorities to clamp down on the noisy extremist group al-Muhajiroun, the EDL became a grab bag of far-right, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant protesters who would take to the streets. It spawned imitators in continental Europe.

The emergence of the EDL, however, came at a moment when more established European nationalist groups such as Front National in France, the British National party (BNP) or the Austrian Freedom party, all became prominent in the public conversation. Far-right nationalist xenophobic sentiment has always been a part of the European conversation, but the strengthening of these groups highlighted how much the ideas they represented had started to slip into the political mainstream, largely off the back of anger with the usual parties of power. But while the far right tried to move itself into the mainstream, its violent edge remained, and as the European debate on immigration and Muslims has become more pronounced, there has been a growth in incidents of extreme rightwing violence.

The response from security forces has been mixed. While we have seen an apparent increase in extreme rightwing violence, there has been less attention paid to it by authorities. In the RUSI-led research, a particularly striking finding was that in about 40% of cases of far-right extremists, they were uncovered by chance – the individual managed to blow himself up or was discovered while authorities conducted another investigation. By contrast, around 80% of violent Islamist lone actors were discovered in intelligence-led operations – in other words, the authorities were looking for them.

But it is easy to understand why the extreme right wing gets overlooked. Most examples are fairly shambolic lonesome individuals whose efforts to launch terrorist plots seem amateurish at best. But they are still attempting to kill fellow citizens to advance a political ideology. And in the case of lone actors, they are at least as lethal as their violent Islamist counterparts – in our dataset of 120 cases, even when one removed Breivik as an outlier, the extreme right wing was as lethal as violent Islamists.

The concern from this phenomenon must now be twofold. On the one hand, the increasing mainstreaming of a xenophobic anti-immigrant narrative will feed the very “clash of civilisations” narrative that groups such as al-Qaida and Isis seek to foster – suggesting that there is a conflict between Islam and the west which they are at the heart of. It will only strengthen this sense and draw people towards them.

But there is also the danger of frustrated expectations. The reality is that notwithstanding a rise in anti-immigrant feeling in Europe, the migrants will still come. Attracted by the opportunity and prosperity they see in Europe (which is often a huge improvement on the environment they came from), they will come to seek low-paying jobs – jobs that western economies will still need to fill and are not taken by locals, which offer better prospects than where they came from. This economic dynamic means that people will not necessarily notice a dramatic change in their material environment. Foreigners will continue to come and will continue to be a presence around them – providing a community to blame when individual economic situations do not change or feel like they are getting worse.

Here lies one of the more dangerous sides of this new European political environment. A polarised society which does not appear to materially change – frustrating those who feel like they have expressed their political will only to find it unanswered. The result, unless handled properly by the mainstream political community, is a potential for violence that has already reared its head brutally on the European continent, and unless carefully checked will do so again.

[backtoiam]

stefano said he woke up thinking about this

Which made me wake up thinking about this...

[Blue]

Didn't see this anywhere. Lexit the Movie provides a good summary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq72f81kkM4

[82_28]

That had to have come from somewhere.

[Morty]

See full article at link. I'm really hoping, against all odds, that the votes of hundreds thousands of Labour Party members count for more than the votes of 140 Labour Party MPs.

The truth behind the Labour coup, when it really began and who manufactured it (EXCLUSIVE)

June 28th, 2016

An exclusive investigation by The Canary can reveal that the current Labour ‘coup’ being instigated against Jeremy Corbyn appears to have been orchestrated by a PR company where Tony Blair’s arch spin-doctor, Alastair Campbell, is a senior advisor.

He sits alongside several other figures, all of whom have direct links to the centre-right of the Labour party, and the Fabians at Portland Communications.

Portland Communications is a political consultancy and public relations agency set up in 2001 by Tim Allan, a former adviser to Tony Blair and director of communications at BSkyB.

The firm works globally on campaigns for numerous companies, institutions and governments, and describes its activities by saying:

"we help our clients find their way through this new faster, noisier and contested landscape. We design and deliver communications strategies – and are trusted by some of the highest profile organisations, governments and individuals in the world."

Its corporate clients include Barclays, Morrisons and Nestle, and it say their team is made up of “former senior advisors from the highest level of British government and politics, the EU, the UN and the World Economic Forum”.

However, Portland came to The Canary’s attention after an incident surrounding abuse being thrown at Jeremy Corbyn, while he supported Pride in London on 25 June.

He was heckled by apparent Labour party activist Tom Mauchline, who jeered at him that:

"it’s your fault! When are you resigning? It’s your fault! I had a Polish friend in tears because you couldn’t get out the vote in Wales, the north and the Midlands. You need to resign. […] Take control Jeremy and resign […] stop using the gay movement as a shield to protect your weak leadership."

The video was quickly up on the BBC website, which also included an interview with Mauchline afterwards, explaining his reasons for the verbal diatribe he gave to Corbyn. The piece of footage is accredited by the BBC as being “Courtesy of Tom Mauchline”.

Mauchline is a Senior Account Manager for Portland Communication, previously working for the campaign group 38 Degrees. But oddly, Mauchline appears to not be the only ‘Labour activist’ working for Portland. In fact, the majority of its staff have direct links to the party.
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So what we can deduce is that a previous “refounding” of the Labour party was attempted – but seemingly failed.

However after Corbyn’s successful leadership election, those who wanted the party to return to, as Ahmed described it, a “pro-war, pro-corporate model of the Democrat Party’s neocon hawks”, decided the need for rapid transformation was paramount.

Enter Portland Communications.

It surely can be no coincidence that so many of the employees of this company are affiliated to both Labour and the Fabians. Nor is it a coincidence that the parent company of Portland, Omnicom Media, was contracted to do PR work under Tony Blair’s leadership and that of Ed Miliband. But what has seemingly been the game changer with this attempted coup, is Portland’s countless links to the media.

I’m sure if most ordinary members of the public sent some mobile footage of them abusing Jeremy Corbyn off to the BBC – the organisation wouldn’t look at it twice. Yet, strangely, Tom Mauchline’s was posted almost immediately. Furthermore, while the Tory party has itself been imploding, the media have given their full attention to the state of the Labour party.

This is not a string of random acts. This is a coordinated attack on Corbyn’s leadership (because let’s be frank, that’s what it is), and it is coming from one source. The Fabian Society. A society who are funded by the likes of HSBC, Cuadrilla (who, oddly, Portland do PR work for) Barclays and Lloyds – while masking themselves with the veneer of advocating ” social progress […] gradualist, reformist and democratic means in a journey towards radical ends. We are a pluralist movement and create space for open debate.”

That, in itself, is debatable.

The Fabians have mobilised their assets in both the parliamentary Labour party, in the media and in the sphere of public relations, namely via Portland Communications – to inflict as much damage as possible on Corbyn. And thus far, it appears to be working – albeit utterly against the will of the party membership and trade unions.

Unfortunately for them, one thing stands in their way – grassroots supporters.

And with over 200,000 having signed a petition calling on the membership to support Corbyn – the Fabians and their shadowy mercenaries may well have a fight on their hands."

http://www.thecanary.co/2016/06/28/trut ... exclusive/

[American Dream]

From EP Thompson scholar Carey Davies:

By far the worst thing about the referendum result (and the football, but mostly the referendum) is that I am sickened by anything to do with England and can no longer enjoy the English countryside, eat cake or listen to The Kinks's 'Village Green Preservation Society' (my three favourite pastimes) without seeing it as reactionary racist nostalgia for an era of imperial slaughter. Is anyone else struggling with this? Truly these are troubled times.

https://twitter.com/carey_davies

[Rory]

From EP Thompson scholar Carey Davies:

By far the worst thing about the referendum result (and the football, but mostly the referendum) is that I am sickened by anything to do with England and can no longer enjoy the English countryside, eat cake or listen to The Kinks's 'Village Green Preservation Society' (my three favourite pastimes) without seeing it as reactionary racist nostalgia for an era of imperial slaughter. Is anyone else struggling with this? Truly these are troubled times.

https://twitter.com/carey_davies

He sounds like a fucking blert. How did he love those things previously, in full knowledge of the hundred million of so people that were slaughtered, raped, starved, during the heady days of Empire, in the name of his "English" countryside.

Fucking muppet

The twat has a BA in History. He can go fuck himself with his, "woe because of brexit" shite

[FourthBase]

So, according to the reluctantly pro-EU anti-Brexit side here, are we supposed to think that Beppe Grillo is wrong about Brexit, too?