Writing About Brexit: Standing Order 24 Passes, II

This was first posted on Facebook on 3rd September 2019, with support from my Ko-Fi network.

First step towards preventing #NoDealBrexit – Boris Johnson lost the vote on Standing Order 24 by 27 votes, 301 to 328.

Boris Johnson announced he’d be tabling a motion for a general election – yes, he DID mean for Monday 14th October! – under the Fixed Terms Parliaments Act, ie demanding that Labour MPs vote for a general election.

Jeremy Corbyn stood up and told Boris Johnson that he’d be all for a general election but the bill – that is, the bill making No Deal Brexit unlawful – had to be passed first.

TWENTY-SEVEN VOTES, people.

Update: 21 Conservative MPs voted against the government. All of them are having the Whip removed, meaning that unless they join or form another party, they sit as independent MPs.

Plus one homophobic Tory crossed the floor to join the LibDems.

The Conservative Party is now down to 288 MPs. Assuming the DUP still vote with them. Boris Johnson has 298 votes in the Commons.

Labour: 247. SNP: 35. LibDem: 16. Change UK: 5. Plaid Cymru: 4. Green: 1: adds up to 308.

Plus of course 36 Independent MPs. Including Kenneth Clarke, Tory MP since 1970, and Philip Hammond, who was a Tory minister a few weeks ago.

Writing About Brexit: Making no-deal Brexit unlawful, part 2

This was first posted on Facebook on 3rd September 2019, with support from my Ko-Fi network.

First step towards preventing No Deal Brexit – Boris Johnson lost the vote on Standing Order 24 by 27 votes, 301 to 328.

Boris Johnson announced he’d be tabling a motion for a general election – yes, he DID mean for Monday 14th October! – under the Fixed Terms Parliaments Act, ie demanding that Labour MPs vote for a general election.

Brexit on BBC extra Question Time

I was tweeting away on Brexit using the #bbcqt hashtag as usual on Thursday nights, when Will Harris, a freelance journalist making radio at @BBC5live, tweeted me asking for a DM. So I did… and not long after midnight, I was on BBC Radio Five live, giving whoever’s up after midnight five minutes of my views on Brexit. (If you want to listen to me, for the next 28 days you can find me on BBC iPlayer, Question Time Extra Time on Radio 5 Live, the 19/10/2017 show, 2 hours 26 minutes in.)

What I’d been asked to respond to was a question on the Dimbleby programme itself: is no deal better than a bad deal?

Smearing by Mensch, 2

There’s a solid 19-point guide at the This-Is-Not-Jewish tumblr, on how to criticise Israel without being anti-Semitic. I have a quibble only over point 5: “Zionism is no more a dirty word than feminism.”

Feminism is the peaceful worldwide revolution for women’s rights and to end the patriarchy. Zionism is the movement, founded in the late 19th century, for the return of Jews to Eretz Yisrael / “the re-establishment of a Jewish homeland in the territory defined as the historic Land of Israel”.

The two are not the same. The equivalents would be the peaceful revolution to end anti-Semitism worldwide or the foundation of a matriarchal state.

The problem with founding a homeland is that in any habitable part of the world, there are people already living there. (The same tumblr also discusses this in how to support Israel without being racist.)

Deir Yassin was a village in what was Palestine. On 9th April 1948, around 120 fighters from the Irgun and Lehi groups (which were “paramilitary” or “terrorists” depending on your viewpoint) attacked the Deir Yassin village, killing over a hundred people, many of them women and children, and drove out the survivors.

In Kelvingrove Park, there is a plaque in memory of the massacre, unveiled on the 40th anniversary by the then-Lord Provost Robert Gray. At a memorial event on 7th April 2002, during Operation Defensive Shield, the STUC General Secretary Bill Spiers said:

“But in the midst of this brutal madness in Palestine there is a glimmer of hope which links April 1948 to April 2002.
“We know what happened in Deir Yassin in 1948 in part because of the eyewitness testimony of Jewish villagers, who had lived peacefully alongside their neighbours until the Zionist terrorists arrived. And more ­ the slaughter was actually stopped by courageous protesting Jews from the nearby village of Givat Shaul.”

Last Friday night Louise Mensch – former Tory MP, current Sun on Sunday columnist, and author of Sparkles, Glamour, Glitz, Passion, Desire, and Destiny, had an embarrassing incident involving a screenshot and Twitter’s auto-complete function, detailed in part 1. I am posting these as a series of debunking reports of the long blog Mensch posted on unfashionista the Saturday night after her Twitter fail.

Louise Mensch, like the Telegraph, started out seeing Jeremy Corbyn’s bid for leadership as a very good joke, since obviously Labour members and supporters would never actually elect him: and then as it became clear that he might just win, that Jeremy Corbyn could be Leader of the Opposition in September, Mensch and the Telegraph appear to be as one on this one thing: Corbyn must be stopped.

On Thursday 13th August, a follower responding to Louise Mensch’s tweet “Christ on a bike. Antisemites for Corbyn” coined the first use of the hashtag #antisemitesforcorbyn. (In the same tweet, he also coined #inbredforcorbyn and #thickasminceforcorbyn.)

Louise Mensch didn’t immediately pick up on this hashtag. Nobody did.

Neither cure nor endure

Back when we first evolved into naked apes, skin tone for human beings was normally high in melanin. Low-melanin skin (“white”) is a genetic freak that may have provided some advantage for living in latitudes where there’s little sunshine for a large part of the year – or it may have happened by accident, a group of freaks moving northward.

VV Brown wrote in September:

In 2010 I was selected to be one of the first black faces for a Marks & Spencer campaign. Many people in the industry questioned my motives. Being a musician and never having previously modelled, I was constantly asked “Why Marks & Spencer?” Only now can I fully understand the driving force that led me into the modelling world.

I began modelling because I was that young girl looking into the magazines and wondering why I didn’t see more faces like mine looking back at me. Whatever tiny impact it made, I wanted to empower the young black women around me, to feel liberated at the inclusion of a black female in a high-profile British campaign.

The Secret Seven

Secret Seven! The name evokes disdain or contempt among many readers who are otherwise ardent fans of Enid Blyton … for most of us the Secret Seven happens to be the least revered series in Blyton’s canon. Is this because the books were written for a younger set of readers? Could it be the smaller format? The perpetual scowl on the face of their highhanded leader, perhaps? –In Defence of the Secret Seven

Now the reshuffle’s over, the full Cabinet is thirty-two – sixteen a side, an unprecedented length for a Cabinet meeting as you can see from the table they use (screengrab off the news by Gaz Weetman):

@jonathanhaynes So many people attending new cabinet that they’ve had to add a picnic table with subbuteo pitch at endtwitter.com/GazWeetman/sta…

— Gaz Weetman (@GazWeetman) September 6, 2012