I much enjoyed this comment on the blog yesterday from someone called Andrew who has been a long time contributor. I know it as tongue in cheek, and yet like all good humour it reveals a deeper truth:
What possible reason could there be for defying the manifest Will of the People as expressed at the ballot box in 2017 and calling for a general election? The People knew they were voting for a Parliament for a fixed term until 2022. Woe betide any politician who suggests that the People in their manifest wisdom got that wrong or didn't understand what they were doing.
Quite so....
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Well, its gone past being funny for me irrespective of how subtle the humour.
People voted for Trump because ‘He is not a politician’ – that is what I heard on TV last night. Woe betide politics because I hear that said too by people here who even have doctorates – I kid you not.
I still think that people are being shamelessly manipulated. A lot of these lessons/techniques seem to have come from Russia and those who work with Putin.
Allied with social media, a MSM that sees it as its duty to present opinions rather than enabling people form their own and outright lying by Johnson and the BREXIT party – its an information clusterfuck of huge proportions.
What was it that Gramsci said again anyone?
@ PSR – ‘What was it that Gramsci said again anyone?’
If it’s not a rhetorical question …. “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” (Prison Notebooks Volume II, Notebook 3, 1930).
One of the best insights of all time
And we have some decidedly morbid symptoms right now
On the other hand,
“If we could learn to look instead of gawking,
We’d see the horror in the heart of farce,
If only we could act instead of talking,
We wouldn’t always end up on our arse.
This was the thing that nearly had us mastered;
Don’t yet rejoice in his defeat, you men!
Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,
The bitch that bore him is in heat again.” (Bertolt Brecht, ‘The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui’; closing lines)
Very good. Plus re referenda if the majority is x you need to go back to the people as soon as there are x new voters. With regard to the 2016 eu referendum we are already at 2x.
If you do not want to repeat in the short term then you need require that x is larger ie a super majority.
Fame at last! But I must acknowledge, the thought came from David Allen Green: https://twitter.com/davidallengreen/status/1187428390086856704
Yes, I was horrified at the blatant plagiarism there, so I am very glad you acknowledged the author (DAG is my current most favourite commentator, he has some wonderful turns of phrase – I am even tempted to join Twitter just to follow and chime in with trending phrases like ‘Padfield’ ).
The above comment is a cracker though, so it’s good to share widely. Amazing the number of people that still don’t get it though. ‘You had your vote’ (re any referendum, said by the people that ‘won’) ,,, and any explanation on how democracy actually works is met with repeated insistence that ‘you lost’ . I always ask who is ‘you’ – I never say how I vote, as a matter of principle – so they are making assumptions based purely on my desire to question blindly accepted memes. The ‘winners’ can obviously tell who each other are by their blind faith in whatever manure they have been fed. Very expensive manure too… Here is a link to Gordon Ross Indycar talking about where the dark money actually came from, to feed vote leave targeted advertising campaign. The investigator has reported it to the police in Scotland – will they have the bravery to follow it up? Probably not
https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=-xraRUdbpXs
But you never know. The money trail leads from NI to Saudi Arabia, to New York,,, oh well, that seems to support some of my suspicions that the whole brexit thing is driven by the US, Saudi, UK, protect the petrodollar by destabilising the EU (re Iran trying to trade oil in Euros) thing. It’s the harmful and malicious way in which brexit is being carried out – there is no way the security services would normally allow such a thing to proceed unchecked – that made me suspicious of ulterior motives.
The attitude of uk political parties to electoral fraud sickens me – electoral rules are meant to create a nearly even playing field so it the ideology and policies that influence people, but those with the money just use every cheat in the book – carpet leafleting to targeted online advertising, to paid trolling. And if anyone thinks they aren’t influenced in some way, then they are fooling themselves. Theresa May on her PM campaign trail said, when asked about the overspending and being fined, ‘we paid our fine, everyone does it’ – I was stunned, such complete dismissal of the law, not even a twitch of shame – she also added ‘even the SNP got fined’ uh no they didn’t and never have been! In one, very rare, simple answer, she stated law was something only to be broken, then told a barefaced lie implicating others into her illegal activities. So, Boris is just holding up tradition and taking it a step further. Unfortunately it is our law-makers that ensure that they are able to break the law (that is they make the laws to hold others back, and make the fines so ridiculously small from their point of view to make it worthwhile breaking them).
A hard act to follow. Forgive me if I turgidly follow the expression of wit, with prosaic reflection.
It is becoming conventional commentariat opinion (spin), that Boris Johnson may be credited with at least closing a deal with the EU by ingeniously shifting the EU position on Brexit. This is not true. Boris Johnson moved the fundamental UK position on Brexit to achieve a deal of cynical expediency that simply abandoned Theresa May’s Red Lines as mere trifles, and threw the DUP under the nearest convenient bus. It was as crude and simple as that. It was a British, wholesale capitulation. We are not supposed to notice desperate, last-ditch failure for what it is; and the media strives hard to write up abject defeat as the Triumph of the age. It was easy for the EU to accept the Johnson capitulation, because the DUP does not represent cross-community, or even majority opinion in Northern Ireland. Johnson was defeated, as every Conservative PM has been defeated and humiliated since David Cameron called the Referendum.
In consequence Johnson lost the last remnants even of his illusory, feeble hope of a majority in Parliament, and therefore of a functioning Government. He wants an election but can’t deliver it, or deliver anything approximating basic Government. Even Zombies can achieve more than Boris Johnson as PM. He can’t govern. He has lost control of the Parliamentary timetable. He defines failure, but in contemporary Britain this is easily spun as “success” cheated, by a predominately Brexit and indefatigably ideological, obtuse and devious media.
Johnson offers an election s if it is now all he can do. It isn’t. He could – and indeed if the well-established conventions of Parliament meant anything at all to him or his Party – simply resign; and leave it for the Crown to find someone to form a Government. He will not do that either, because such a Government would certainly eliminate ‘No Deal’ before an election; but it would also provide the allegedly desired early election. Johnson wants an election, but only if he can frame and provide the context and political agenda first; and only from a position of office, because only from the advantage of office does he believe he can manage the election, agenda and media: to ensure ‘No Deal’ remains a serious, imminent political prospect – because ‘No Deal’ it is still the first preference for the new, core hard-right Conservative Party.
All too true John Warren.
But where does Johnson continue to get his Teflon from? How does he continue to get away with it?
He seems to defy gravity as do most idiots and liars do these days. I’m sure that I know the answer but it irritates me somewhat to keep seeing it.
Like it.
I am thinking of celebrating Brexit on Oct 31st on the gardenbridge over the Thames with water cannons spraying . I aim to be accompanied by a young American technology expert. Can any of your contributors suggest anything else to add to the event?
Could I suggest that simultaneously, we have a steeplechase for unicorns at Aintree, on the Grand National course, and, specially for the occasion, Beecher’s Brook be renamed Boris’s Ditch?
I don’t get it.
Maybe it would work better as a joke if somehow we were still waiting for the MPs elected in 2017 to take their seats in the commons?
Does it work if MP’s elected to seat in a specific part moved to anothet part? Without letting their voters confirm their change of view?
It has always been possible to force an early election under the FTPA.
If Macron and the other banker placemen in the EU bosom are finessed one more time by the true EU champions then, the hard brexit by expiration of A50 is OFF.
Why is it the EU’s decision when we get a hard brexit?
Why was there even a 2 year limit to A50? It is utterly illogical. It’s only effect is the threat of a disorderly exit if a deal isn’t agreed by the arbitrary 2 year period.
The EU just has to say there is no time limit, so no threat of a disorderly (hard) brexit from their end.
The onus is on the departing state to decide on a brexit that their population is happy with then give the EU a reasonable notice to implement it.
How could Macron not agree with the reasonableness of that?or the whole EU27? Or us?
Come on you champions!
Surely the sweetener in the new improved deal is that it gives the Government almost complete Henry VIII powers (Gina Miller). So that King Boris can rule for 5 years without the distraction of parliament. By then, I am sure he will be bored and move on.
I wonder if there is any support for a boycott of the next General Election to further shove Leave logic back in their faces. They have after all threatened to boycott another People’s Vote on the grounds that we’ve already had one. Alas there isn’t a cycle for referenda, but there is a cycle for general elections which I think should be adhered to.
I’m minded to vote Liberal Democrat in 2022 but not at this stage.
I admit I am not sure I get your logic
Please don’t boycott the election. That would allow the use of statistics such as XX% of voters voted for…
Much better to turn up and spoil your vote. They have to be counted. If we get enough spoiled votes, then it becomes a true constitutional crisis (alluding that we’re not there yet *coughs*).
Don’t play their game of non-participation.
The way to win is to participate and make your dissatisfaction known through the ballot box.
[Apologies for posting here, rather than in the blog for 25 October – couldn’t find a way to do that!]
(Regarding Labour’s complicated policy on Brexit):
Let me spell it out.
Labour acknowledges the even split between remainers and leavers in the referendum.
Nevertheless, in recognition of the democratic decision (albeit by a narrow majority) to leave, he will, given the opportunity, negotiate a new withdrawal agreement with the EU.
Again, recognising the democratic imperative, he will put the results of his renegotiation up against Remain in a second referendum.
That is labour’s policy, albeit relatively sophisticated, but nevertheless very clear and straightforward, allowing the people to make the democratic decision, in preference to imposing an arbitrary one on the population.
We can explore the relative merits of the two only after that renegotiation has been made.
I hope my explanation is sufficiently clear. Apologies for any remaining unclarity.
And as I have pointed out, it assumes the EU would play this game
Why would they do that when Labour says it would campaign against its own deal?
That is the fundamental flaw
Apart from the impossibility of selling it to voters