The neo-Troubles and media manipulation

This was first posted on Facebook on 3rd February 2021, with support from my Ko-Fi network.

The most complicating factor in figuring out what might happen in Northern Ireland over the next few weeks or months, is that Boris Johnson is a chronic liar, and yet neither mainstream media nor his ministers nor his MPs seem able to say so.

We can note what Boris Johnson says. But we know, from past experience, that what he says doesn’t correspond to what he’ll actually do: and what Johnson wants to do, essentially, is anything that’ll make him popular.

Brexit has no benefits

This was first posted on Facebook on 20th January 2021, with support from my Ko-Fi network.

Brexit has no benefits.

Two days ago, a fleet of lorries, employed in the pre-Brexit days to transport live shellfish from Scotland to buyers in the EU, travelled to London to protest the effects of Brexit on the fishing industry. Brexiters had told the fishing industry that leaving the EU would mean an end to Brussels “red tape” about catching fish, people employed in the fishing industry had believed them and voted for Brexit, – of course what it meant was, that live shellfish, needing to be transported fast in refrigerated lorries to their overseas markets, were being held up too long by the terms of the trade deal, to be worth buying.

Yesterday, Boris Johnson only just won a government vote on a Lords amendment to the Trade Bill – the amendment passed, by a majority of only 11 votes. Given the Tories have a majority of 80 MPs, how did this happen?

Happy Brexit Day

This was first posted on Facebook on 31st December 2020, with support from my Ko-Fi network.

At 11pm tonight, the UK leaves the transition period in which we enjoyed the benefits of still being part of the EU: we have Brexit.

The consequences of this kind of deliberate economic self-harm are impossible to fully predict, since no one has ever done this before, and in this post, I don’t intend to try.

There are so many ways and so many people who could have taken a stand and prevented this, beginning with David Cameron on the morning of 24th June 2016.

I was not one of the people who ever had the power to prevent this, and nor, most probably, were you, if you’re reading this: the maximum number I include in “so many” is the 92,153 Conservative party members who decided to vote for Boris Johnson to be our Prime Minister in 2019 and thus put a lazy lying charlatan primarily interested in being applauded, in charge of taking the UK out of the EU. Then there are the 160 Tory MPs who voted for him to be on the ballot.

And Theresa May, who was so keen to lose those pesky EU laws about fair treatment of immigrants, that she embraced Brexit on the happy assumption she’d be able to have all of the benefits of the EU and none of the legal restrictions requiring her to treat even black people decently. I still recall reading the account of the dinner summit with Juncker, after she’d triggered Article 50 but before the GE2017 election, where it had to be explained to her that she couldn’t pick and choose the bits of the EU she wanted versus the bits she didn’t like.

And the 172 Labour MPs who decided to create a schism in the Labour Party after the EU referendum (regardless of result) in order to get rid of Corbyn, and only succeeded in having a very publicly un-unified Opposition party, which they are still dealing with today.

And Corbyn himself and all of the Labour MPs who voted to let Theresa May trigger Article 50 without a plan.

And the LibDems who looked greedily at the possibility of winning formerly-Tory voters to the right-wing Remain party and refused to accept Jeremy Corbyn as the only constitutional choice for caretaker Prime Minister to stop Brexit, thus rendering the possibility of a vote of no-confidence to topple Johnson’s minority government meaningless.

And Jeremy Corbyn himself, who accepted the 50/50 result of the UK total results as a win for Leave, and did nothing to make Labour the left-wing party for Remainers, thus rendering opposition to Tory Brexit a matter for the SNP and the Greens.

And the BBC, which made a political decision to treat Brexit as a given, and a programming decision to find “balance” rather than giving viewers an accurate and informed view of the catastrophic consequences of leaving the EU.

But mostly, the Conservative MPs who over four and a half years, for the most part, voted for whatever May or Johnson threw at them to vote for, repeating loyally the lies about Brexit they were told to say, doing what they were Whipped to do by the party authorities and not worrrying out loud at all – with a small group of exceptions – if deliberate economic self-harm was really what they ought to be doing to the UK.

(Nigel Farage, while he can certainly claim to have triggered the Brexit referendum by creating a party to the right of the Tories to split the bigot vote and frighten Cameron into offering the EU referendum to win the bigot vote back to the Tories for 2015, could not have prevented Brexit once the results were counted in June 2016: his career is, I hope, on a long slow slide to nowhere now Brexit is completed.)

James O’Brien of LBC had a solid message which bears repeating to Leave voters who are still trying to celebrate their decision:

“We are now moving into the bit where ordinary people, as opposed to people in my profession who get paid for it or people in politics who get high on it, are going to be proved categorically and comprehensively wrong.

“And for your mental health you now face a really important choice. You either continue clinging on to this fury and this almost incoherent anger and it will continue to hurt you.

“[It] won’t just hurt you. It will hurt the people around you. It’s such a simple choice to just surrender it.

“Nobody is going to hold you responsible for your Brexit vote for the rest of your life. I will make sure of that in my little contribution to public discourse in this country.”

But the mostly, what I think of when I think of Brexit, and the hundreds of MPs who knew better but voted us to this end anyway, is that quite from Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer:

“The plain truth is that I knew better but went to Everest anyway. And in doing so I was a party to the death of good people, which is something that is apt to remain on my conscience for a very long time.”

Everest is possible to climb: we’ve known that for over sixty years. But Everest is dangerous to climb, and if anything goes wrong, people die. In the Death Zone, climbers cannot trust themselves to make good decisionsL Jon Krakauer got down from the summit alive partly by skill – he was a good enough climber that he was nearly the first at the top that day – partly by luck – the storm that killed so many people hit when he was on his way down – and partly because he was an experienced enough climber that he could follow the route back by rote, not by judgement, of which he had none at that point.

Jon Krakauer notes that while you can point at this and that bad decision that made Brexit worse – as we will be pointing at the bad decisions made by Cameron, May, Corbyn, Swinson, and Johnson – worst of all Johnson – over the past four and a half years – on the road to Brexit, the overridingly bad decision was to leave the EU, and nothing could ever have made that bad decision right.

I voted Remain: I know it was wrong to leave the EU: I am not going to cease from saying so for the sake of “unity”. Hundreds of MPs did this wrong to us, justifying it on the basis of a nearly 50-50 vote in an advisory referendum as the “will of the people” (ignoring the demographics and the polling that told them that Brexit never was the will of the majority and a re-run referendum would now have the opposite result). They were wrong to do so, and while Leavers may cling to and justify their bad vote and their bad decision, and be angry when the rest of us won’t accept their justifications, we know – we know – that the majority of Conservative MPs knew better, and took us here anyway.

We have left the European Union. We are a third country. Our government has pushed through a trade deal which means the EU can sell goods to us without tariffs or paperwork, but we cannot export goods to them without paperwork and if our government diverges from EU standards there will be tariffs. We can no longer sell financial services to 27 countries: we have permanently lost the European Medicines Agency and the European Banking Authority: we are no longer the United States’ first stop in Europe, for Europe. That’s Brexit.

Vote Leave Wants No Deal Brexit

The Internal Market Bill passed Second Reading last night by 77 votes.

I couldn’t listen to all of the debate – I was working yesterday, having decided to take off Wednesday and Thursday as usual – for PMQs (Keir Starmer will be absent: he is self-isolating as one of his household has shown symptoms of coronavirus) and because Wednesday is the second day of the committee of the whole House examining the bill.

But I listened to enough of the debate, including Boris Johnson’s opening statement presenting the bill (and Ed Miliband’s strong rebuttal – Starmer picked him to sub in, and I have to say, he was terrific) to see very definitely two things.

A second EU referendum or Brexit?

In November 2017, I wrote that the idea of having a second EU referendum was a “superficially-attractive option with very high stakes”.

So it still is, and I stand by everything I wrote a year ago about the risks and dangers of a second referendum: including the risk that Leave might still win.

We do know a lot more now about how the Leave campaign unlawfully gathered data uon UK voters, how they used that data to target adverts on Facebook, and how they illegally overspent the limits set by the Electoral Commission.

A general election or Brexit?

Can the UK have a general election before we leave the EU on 29th March 2019?

The UK must have a general election again on Thursday 2nd June 2022.

The only way in which the UK can have a general election before then, is if either two-thirds of the MPs in the House of Commons vote for it (433 MPs, give or take a few Sinn Féin) or if the government loses two votes of confidence, a fortnight apart.

You can choose one of these for 2019, what's more important to you?
Bumper 7 day poll

— Ian B #NHSLove (@ijbrads66) January 2, 2019

Current state of the parties in the Commons:

Three Choices for Brexit

May’s deal was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of the Deal’s burial was signed by the Presidents of the European Commission and the European Council, by France, Sweden, Spain and Belgium, by the Chairman of the European Research Group, and the chief mourner. Leo Varadkar signed it: and Leo Varadkar’s name was good upon Fine Gael, for anything he chose to put his hand to. May’s deal was as dead as a door-nail.

Theresa May’s deal is the EU’s deal.

Our three choices before 29th March 2019 are

• May’s deal, which is bad
• No-deal Brexit, which is catastrophic
• or Remain in the EU

Theresa May: erg 0/year

Theresa May won her vote of confidence 200-117 and is off to meet with the EU Commission, still Prime Minister – though having lost the confidence of nearly one-third of her MPs.

So, where are we now?

The deal the EU negotiated for Theresa May is the only deal they’ll accept. The EU have, jointly and severally, made that clear. Any talk of changes to the deal is uninformed rubbish. At this point in time, the House of Commons has three choices:

• To ratify May’s deal and leave the EU on 29th March 2019
• To refuse May’s deal and leave the EU catastrophically on 29th March 2019
• To revoke Article 50 and remain in the EU

For many MPs, the fact that they have no ability to move the EU to a better deal is too unpalatable to be comprehended.

Gone means gone, May means May

Last night Graham Brady, chair of the 1922 Committee, counted 48 letters in his cupboard and let Theresa May know she’d have a leadership challenge this week. This morning he let the world know.

The system for Tories who want rid of their leader is primarily in the hands of MPs. If one-sixth of the Conservative backbenchers have written a letter of no-confidence in their leader to the chair of the 1922 Committee, a vote of no-confidence is called: if the leader wins that vote, they can’t be challenged again for another year: if they lose that vote, there is a leadership election in which the current leader cannot stand, voted on by Tory MPs only until only two candidates are left standing: the Tory membership then gets to vote on the last two candidates.

Tonight, 315 Tory MPs will get to have a second vote to see if they’ve changed their minds since 2016. (Most of them have been arguing that we shouldn’t get to have a second vote to see if we have.)

Hiroshima Day, 2018

On this day 73 years ago, the United States exploded a nuclear bomb over Hiroshima, the first and also the second-last use of nuclear weapons in war time.

The United Kingdom’s supply of nuclear missiles are stored at their purpose-built home in Faslane.

The majority of Scots support a no-nukes Scotland.

Scottish Labour, the SNP, and the Greens all support not renewing Trident.

All of this adds up to the surety that when Scotland becomes independent, and Faslane ceases to be a UK military base, the nuclear missiles must go.

But the removal of Trident is always going to be the biggest problem the Westminster government/the UK’s Ministry of Defence has with Scottish independence, because not only is there nowhere else for it to go and it would take a couple of decades to build an alternative site, there isn’t a realistic alternate site in the rest of the UK for deep-water nuclear submarines.

Devonport is physically possible but is a political impossibility, certainly for any Conservative government (and in a twenty-year construction plan there will likely be at least one Conservative government): while Scots feel uncomfortable about how near Faslane is to Glasgow, Devonport is literally in the middle of Plymouth. Pembrokeshire is a technically feasible location, but building an entirely new military depot for nuclear weapons on the coast of Wales creates a whole new political problem for rUK after iScotland has voted Yes and departed.