Today's choice in the House of Commons:
Will they?
Won't they?
You know they will.
And they're dragging you behind them.
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As Keir Starmer jumps off the cliff edge, Theresa May will convince him that he is walking in the air. Labour pathetic.
We have underestimated the dangerous power of stupidity.
Among other unpleasant lessons, we are discovering that stupidity is contagious.
It really does look like it. The probability of the UK getting a favorable deal from the EU is low to non-existent. The Irish will be sympathetic not only because the UK is a major trading partner (though now in 3rd place for exports after the US and Belgium) but there is grave concern over Northern Ireland (Ironically very more so than in the UK as a whole). Ireland is however only one of 27.
I do not detect any malice amongst my many EU friends but a heightened fear of the EU breaking up since the Trump victory. The likelihood of any deal for the UK that will be favorable (which was remote in any event) is now to all extent gone.
There also seems to be a wilful ignorance of the process. The two year period after the filing of divorce papers is to sort out existing commitments, no to negotiate any future trade deal. I anticipate things getting very ugly; the rabid anti EU right wing press will ramp up the rhetoric. This will start when the EU demands c £50Bn for commitments that the UK has already agreed to. The only strong bargaining chip that the UK has is the estimated 3 million EU citizens. As I’ve said before despite living in the UK since 1981 I have never become a UK citizen and retain an Irish passport. Threatening to expel EU citizens seems a crazy idea but the UK parliament reminds me of the 1951 Robert Heinlein science fiction novel “The Puppet Masters” or the 1956 film “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers” where aliens effectively zombify their hosts. Who knows what crazy thing they will do next.
he “will of the people” which has disturbing echos of the Nazi concept of Volksgemeinschaft seems to be taking on a life of its own. Where will it lead us?
Fascism
And so many politicians of the right and centre (which would have been ‘the right’) appear to be encouraging that direction of travel in the UK and elsewhere in Europe – and most especially in the US where the Republican party are positively salivating at the prospect. Thus, rowing back from this looks increasingly unlikely. It seems that the lessons of Europe’s age of facism – or ‘Age of Extremes’ as Hobsbawm so accurately labelled it – have been entirely forgotten.
What’s certainly become clear now is that the optimism that followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Bloc that the developed world was entering a period of progressive, social liberalism and all that comes with that has been turned on its head. Rather, it seems we’ve just lived through a contemporary and elogated version of the period 1918 – 1929 and are now heading toward replicating 1939 and all that followed. Recall that on that occasion global conflict was preempted by various regional and/or national wars (e.g. 2nd Sino-Japanese War from 1937, Spanish Civil War from 1936) and the beginning of the Third Reich in Nazi Germany from 1933. From what I’ve read recently my guess would be that certain of Trump’s key advisors are not unaware of the parallels (substitute muslims for jews), or indeed what the ultimate outcome was for the United Sates (a golden age of economic growth and social mobility based on traditional Judo-Christian beliefs) and indeed even for countries that “lost”, such as Japan and Germany). There are many other parallels of course – trade wars and inequality to name just two – but for such a depressing and scary comment I’ll leave my argument there.
I wish you were not so accurate in your assessment
But it seems entirely plausible
By an odd coincidence I’ve just come across a folder of letters to my father from a young Russian emigre woman living in Paris called Nathalie, who he’d met in 1936 on a cultural exchange. They are mainly written between 1936-1939 and contain long and passionate discusssions about the politics of the time, including the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, the pros and cons of communism which Nathalie’s family had fled and which my left wing father was very interested in.
This feels like such a similar time and I often imagine families compulsively tuning in to the home service to listen to the latest news, ever more depressing and unbelievable, in the same way that we open our computers or look at our smart phones now.
This young woman who in 1920 was taken as a 6 month old baby from Kiev to Odessa and put on a boat in the middle of the night with her mother and grandmother and only the clothes they were wearing wrote the folowing:
28.10.36
“Je pense qu’il n’y a qu’une seule politique capable d’engendrer la paix en Europe, c’est une politique europeenne collective, ou chacun sente que sa responsibilite est engage, ou chacun sent qu’il est solidaire des autres.”
Roughly translated:
“I think that there is only one kind of politics that would enable peace in Europe and that’s a politics of European collaboration where everyone feels a sense of resposibility, where everyone feels bound together in kind of interdependance.”
This was written by a 16 or 17 year old.
Given what is happening now I found this incredibly poignant.
We seem to be sleepwalking again into hostility.
Another heart wrenching letter written in 1945 describes the exhausted and dejected mood of post war Paris.
We can only hope that somehow sanity prevails.
I hope you might send this to the Guardian
Thank you
I’ve sent it to Guardian letters….I assume that’s what you were suggesting?
Thank you
I hope they use it
Lemmings – the lot.
What’s really sad is that the vast majority of MPs know full well in their hearts and in their souls that
1. their constitutional duty is to apply their intelligence, analysis, wisdom and judgement in the best interests of their constituents and the country as a whole, even when this differs from the opinions they express and that
2. doing this in not in those best interests,
but they are going to go ahead and do it anyway in order to protect their party. Actually, that’s more than sad, that’s scary.
I fear the country’s future is being treated as subsidiary to that of the Tory Party – and that was of course the reason for calling the referendum in the first place. So perhaps we should be unsurprised.
The only faint hope I can muster is that some Brexiteers are not complete zealots
http://online.fliphtml5.com/mmxc/jdxb/#p=1
though the author, John Mills, whilst in favour of a relatively hard Brexit prescribes a subsequent course rather different from the Tory dream…
Well – I will not go quietly – I promise you that.
In fact I will get much louder.
This has been a shambles from Day 1. The media response to the referendum to frame it as a massive victory has gone unchallenged. The opposition was routed and has never found a voice around which to gather. Labour politicians in particular have been utterly spineless, and yes most of all it’s the ones – the Coopers, the Miliband s, the Reeves’s – who have voted for something they know is ultimately wrong for their constituents that I am talking about.
We now have two years of May framing the discussions with Europe in an unrealistic, increasingly nationalistic and ultimately damaging way. Meanwhile the press will ramp it up with the anti Europeanism. The spineless and cowed BBC will increasingly spout the hard right Tory propaganda unchallenged. And the failures of the negotiation will be blamed on our European partners, not the unrealistic and arrogant expectations of the hard right.