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Originally posted by Riverlove:

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Originally posted by 6STRINGJOKER:

Merkel's history in October. The EU will fall like dominoes in the next few years.

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Sounds like it's time to anschluss somebody.

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Originally posted by THGRRI:
Let me get this straight. On Wednesday, March 29, 2017 11:48 AM I revive Mal4prezs' link ( necroposted, past thread ). I post about Brexit. A discussion on the subject ensues. The next day SIG starts a new link titled " Brexit is official: Article 50 is invoked. " She posts nothing more than a link back to Mal4prez's thread. So, your logic suggests to you that you should post about Brexit here.

well, OK

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Originally posted by DREAMTROVE:
Thanks Thggri, for the threadjack on Mal's necroposted thread.

I'll guess I'll repost here.

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Originally posted by Riverlove:

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Originally posted by 6STRINGJOKER:

Merkel's history in October. The EU will fall like dominoes in the next few years.

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Sounds like it's time to anschluss somebody.

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they tried that before, it didn't work out well. They lack the naval power.

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Originally posted by Riverlove:

Well maybe this time Matthew McConaughey won't steal an Enigma Machine from U-571, and that gay guy in England won't be able to break the code.

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Originally posted by THGRRI:

Let me get this straight. On Wednesday, March 29, 2017 11:48 AM I revive Mal4prezs' link ( necroposted, past thread ). I post about Brexit. A discussion on the subject ensues. The next day SIG starts a new link titled " Brexit is official: Article 50 is invoked. " She posts nothing more than a link back to Mal4prez's thread. So, your logic suggests to you that you should post about Brexit here.

well, OK

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SIG says I'm a deep state troll. oh my.

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:
"But Juncker appeared to rule out any new postponement, leaving British lawmakers with a simple choice: deal, no deal or revoke Brexit."

That's always been my point of wonderment ... Britain doesn't get to decide when it gets booted out of the EU, the EU decides. Afaik, everything else going on the the British Parliament is noise.

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Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:
"But Juncker appeared to rule out any new postponement, leaving British lawmakers with a simple choice: deal, no deal or revoke Brexit."

That's always been my point of wonderment ... Britain doesn't get to decide when it gets booted out of the EU, the EU decides. Afaik, everything else going on the the British Parliament is noise.

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Maybe nobody in Yurp reads the fine print.

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Labour has been waging a culture war against its own base for decades, fixating on liberalism instead - George Galloway

Not since the election of 1935 has the Parliamentary Labour Party been so small. When political dinosaurs roamed the earth a split Labour Party collapsed to the challenge of the Great Depression and seemed bound for extinction.

Ten years later they had their biggest ever election win sweeping Mr Churchill the War Leader from office.

My point is not merely to put in scale what happened in the British general election but also to illustrate the famous truth that there is no "final victory," and no "final defeat" either. It's never over.

I consistently predicted, on RT and everywhere, that Labour seats would go down like dominoes, that Labour would lose dozens - maybe scores - of seats throughout the Midlands, the north-west and north-east of England, and in Wales. All my expectations came to pass as counting continued into a real-life Friday the 13th for Labour.

It was Brexit of course – only the foolhardy deny their own electorate on such a matter, and so brazenly and for so long – but not only Brexit. In former premier Harold MacMillan's words "it's never one damned thing, it's one damned thing after another."

Labour's defiance of its own supporters behind its 'red-wall' – seats in some cases it had held for a hundred years, seemed to put the tin-hat on things for the British industrial and post industrial heartlands. For American readers, imagine Michigan, Connecticut and Pennsylvania.

And that's after many years of amused bemused tolerance of an increasingly metropolitan liberal Labour Party – which regularly parachuted in such liberals in Labour livery into what were until now safe Labour seats. So, for example, that well known coal-miner Tony Blair dropped in for a while as the MP for the mining town of Sedgefield with his fancy London Barrister ways…

Because these kinds of faces of Labour had no connection to industry itself – they probably thought Swarfega was a Balearic island – they saw their task as not to rage against the dying of the mining and manufacturing light, but to persuade their people to go quietly into that good night. Close the pit, open a heritage park, shut the factory, put up a shopping mall in its stead. Where once were 40-hour blue collar union jobs with decent pay the gig-economy would have to suffice. It's "flexible," don't you know…

Labour's descent into the snake-pit of identity politics began a long time ago. I should know, I was there. Under the influence of the 'Euro-Communists', an ideological breakaway from Moscow in the 1980s, it was imagined that the working class – and thus its class interests – had withered away, and that new "communities" (many of them imagined) would have to be the building blocks for Labour political power.

It's rather as if someone persuaded you that there was something called a "football community" which could be dealt with collectively. But members of the football community – people like myself who are football crazy – have nothing in common with each other. In fact as fans of rival teams, we oftentimes hate each other. Political "offers" to such an imagined community can therefore often exacerbate divisions as well as angering those who think football is 22 fools running around chasing a pig's bladder.

Transpose this, thus: If you are a white, heterosexual, married man or woman with kids, seeing your supposed party endlessly fixating about race, gender, sexual politics and the wonders of liberalism, the EU and all that jazz-hands might well begin to make you feel, well, left out.

If you are a lady of a certain age, you might feel a bit left out at your party worshiping at the altar of youth, a 'Youthquake' may for you be a distant memory. When your party picks as its plum-policy free, nationalised broadband, you may momentarily wonder what they are talking about.

If you live beyond the 'red wall' you may just wonder why almost ALL of the top leaders of a party depending on Northern voters had virtually adjoining constituencies in North London.

London left-wing politics should be imagined as a hot-house where only the most exotic political flowers bloom. Nice for a visit but with not much in common with the colder climate to which you are returning home.

I have long proselytized for the view, confirmed amply in the election, that for decades Labour has been conducting a kind of culture war against its own voting base. Instead of country and patriotism the party worshipped the supra-nationalism of the EU. More comfortable with the flag of Bolivia or Venezuela than with their own country's flag. More interested in the human rights of the criminal than with their victims. Endlessly looking for small minority blocs to patronize, careless that over-identification with one bloc may come at the price of alienation from another, much larger.

Boris Johnson just went through Labour's 'red wall' like a knife through butter. It will be neither quick nor easy to rebuild. There was no Youthquake – only a Brexitquake. Damage is clearly extensive and considerable. There is no word yet of the number of casualties but there will clearly be many. The Labour Party itself is merely the first of them.

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The Brexit party folded, but make no mistake: Farage won it for Johnson
Darren Loucaides

Whatever Nigel Farage does next, his decision to stand aside against 317 Tories and target Labour leavers was monumental

Last modified on Fri 13 Dec 2019 10.10 EST

Until 11 November, many had assumed that Nigel Farage’s Brexit party was revving up for a general election. But that morning, Farage told an audience of supporters and journalists in Hartlepool that his Brexit party would be standing down in 317 Conservative-held seats to avoid splitting the leave vote. The audience was stunned; there was muted applause after he finished.

This election will be remembered as a resounding, crushing victory for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives. Just as has happened countless times before, Farage will be written off and ridiculed for his party not winning a single seat. But that morning of 11 November was the single most important moment of the campaign. Farage won it for Johnson.

The decision to stand down against the Tories was not an easy one. According to Ed Jankowski, who was the Brexit party’s digital strategist until the middle of November before resigning, Farage was for a long time eager to stand in every seat and not stand down – as he was being pressured to do by his erstwhile Leave.EU ally Arron Banks. Farage instead kept pushing a leave alliance that the Tories were never likely to officially agree to. But as the Brexit party started to flag in the polls, Farage lost his nerve and gave in to those not wanting to challenge Conservative seats.

In Farage’s speech, and in the weeks following, he pledged to scoop up the leave vote in Labour heartlands and places people were unlikely to ever vote Tory. As for Jankowski, he told me that he pushed hard to get a detailed data set of Labour leavers. If he had stayed on, Jankowski says he would have pushed for the Brexit party to hone its digital content so that it made a strong emotional appeal to those voters.

Instead of the sophisticated digital campaign Jankowski envisaged, the wheels seemed to come off the Brexit party campaign. Farage’s close ally Alexandra Phillips, who used to be his head of media at Ukip, publicly criticised the decision to stand down, saying she felt “disenfranchised” for not being able to vote Brexit party in her own Conservative-held constituency. Farage and the party chairman, Richard Tice, are also rumoured to have fallen out over strategy, with Farage no longer showing up in the seat Tice stood in Hartlepool.

Farage spent the rest of the campaign travelling predominantly to Labour leave seats, albeit to greatly diminished crowds compared to the big rallies seen earlier in the year. But while the shine had gone from the Brexit party, and it ended up winning no seats, its campaign has had a major impact on the election.

One of the early results of the election night, a Labour hold in Sunderland Central by 2,964 votes, was striking for the swing. Labour was down 13.4%, Conservatives up slightly by 2%, while the Brexit party had a swing of 11.6% from a standing start. When the first 10 seats were in, in mostly northern and Midlands seats, there was nearly a 10% drop for Labour, while the Conservatives were only up 2.1% and the Brexit party was scooping up a 6% swing.

In some places the Conservatives gained seats from Labour on modest swings, while the Brexit party got swings of more than 10%. In Don Valley, Caroline Flint’s 2017 majority of 5,169 appears to have been swallowed up by the Brexit party – which won 6,247 votes as the Tories took the seat. A similar dynamic appears to have taken place in Tony Blair’s former seat of Sedgefield.

Farage, whatever you think of him, was right. Many Labour leavers, who couldn’t bring themselves to vote Tory, did vote for the Brexit party. This wasn’t the case everywhere. In the much-watched seat of Workington, the Brexit party won little more than 1,749 votes to the Conservatives’ 20,488.

It’s not clear what happens to the Brexit party now, with a Conservative majority set to secure an exit from the EU. Farage has already registered the name of the Reform party. As this general election campaign wore on, Farage increasingly focused on radical reform – more direct democracy, scrapping of the House of Lords, a reformed electoral system. When I spoke to the Brexit party’s Claire Fox in October, she saw Brexit as the gateway to a kind of bloodless revolution for British democratic institutions. Fox is part of a core of former Revolutionary Communist party figures who have flocked to the Brexit party and remained loyal to Farage, who ended up convening around Spiked, the rightwing media outlet.

With Brexit a done deal, Farage himself is rumoured to be heading for the US to cash in via the lucrative speaker circuit. Farage basically admitted to Andrew Neil on election night that he would be giving stump speeches for Trump on the campaign trail for the US presidential election 2020.

Wherever he ends up, and whatever happens to the Brexit party now, this election is the culmination of a long campaign to redraw the map of British politics, starting with Farage forcing David Cameron’s hand in calling an EU referendum in the first place. Without Farage’s decision to stand down against 317 Conservatives, the election would have been very different. Without going hard after Labour leavers, the Conservatives would not have a thumping majority. Although his party hasn’t won a seat, and even if his campaign itself faltered, the untold story of this election is how Farage once again shaped events. He remains the bête noire of British politics.

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:
When it comes to referenda -

We in the US have an issue, and I think it comes down to us not having a parliamentary/Prime Minister system. In that system the representatives (ie Parliament) and the executive (ie the PM) are fused into one functioning unit. And generally each party is strongly associated with a particular platform. For example pro- or anti-Brexit. So when there's a referendum, one would assume that the party that's for that referendum would be voted in, and would then carry it out in the Parliament/PM system. So to some extent the referendum has a good chance of being synced up with the Parliament/executive functions.

Here, there'd be the referendum, the parties, the executive branch and the legislative branch. What would happen if the vote was split between parties (Congress/Executive, or one house of Congress/Executive) and the referendum? Or Congress+Executive v referendum? Who would be tasked with carrying it out? Especially if the party most strongly associated as anti-the-referendum has significant blocking power between the Legislative/Executive branches?

I think we'd need a major restructuring, or some rule that holds all parties to executing a referendum even if it's against their party principles/platform especially when they hold significant power to stop it.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Interesting point. But Brexit is an example of a Parliamentarian system that ignored it's referendum (Theresa May, bolloxing the negotiations with the EU for three years; MPs ignoring their constituencies) while CA is a USA-style legislative system that routinely implements the results of referenda. Come to think of it, I'm not sure how the CA system works, other than the state Legislature drafts a law based on the results of the referenda. Maybe the politicians are so afraid of the voters that they don't stray too far from the referenda? I'll have to look that up!

I know that CA is pointed to as a system that has gone referenda-crazy, with the many referenda on the ballot each year leading to poorly thought-out legislation. But I think this is just democracy at work, which could be improved on if the media did a better job of informing the public of the anticipated benefits and downsides, and the actual successes and failures of referenda.

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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

I'd nuke a BILLION PEOPLE if it would save the other 7 billion from living under Putin. Hell, I might go all the way to the last 100 people on Earth to keep this planet from being under fascist rule.- WISHIMAY

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Originally posted by second:
Is Boris Johnson a Brilliant Political Strategist?

Maybe so. But Johnson did this by giving the hard right exactly what it wanted: Brexit, and no shilly-shallying about it. As for anti-immigration fever calming, few people ever seem to take a good look at the timing of all this. The Brexit referendum, unfortunately, was held very shortly after the peak of the European refugee crisis, when panic about it was still fresh:

The graph is here and will give you great insight:
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/12/is-boris-johnson-a-brilliant-po
litical-strategist/

It’s pretty easy to calm anti-immigrant fever if you simply wait a few years for the fever to break naturally. And it’s pretty easy to defang a political movement if you basically surrender to all their demands, no? If you want to argue that this was the only way to get things done, and Johnson was the only one to see it, fine. But there’s not a lot of political brilliance here.

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Maybe SECOND is having some derangement syndrome by proxy on behalf of the British anti-democracy crowd. Yanno, the people for whom a democratic vote simply isn't good enough.

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:
looks like Britain is having its own derangement syndrome brewing ...

Left-Wing Newspaper Advises People "How To Leave The United Kingdom" After Election Loss

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Maybe SECOND is having some derangement syndrome by proxy on behalf of the British anti-democracy crowd. Yanno, the people for whom a democratic vote simply isn't good enough.

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It's just SECOND, doing its best to spread disinformation wherever it goes.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

And as a point of accuracy, the chart represent migrants to ITALY, SPAIN, AND GREECE BY SEA. But THAT is not the source of England's migrants, who typically come from either the Comonwealth nations or from the poorer eastern European nations in the EU, and in a different timespan!

The author of this article is brain dead and more interested in making a propaganda point than in describing reality.

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Why are you against Brexit, Second?

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Before and after - VERY hard moving targets to try and measure as better or worse.

Because you never know what would have been otherwise. You can SPECULATE and FANTASIZE (as you often do) what might have been to compared to what is now - but you'll never know.

And then - what's your timeline for measuring the outcome? A week? I'm sure the US was in pretty shit shape a week after the Revolutionary War. Lost lives. Lost property. Bankrupt country. People could easily have looked around and said to themselves - this was a really bad idea.

Not that I expect you to address any of this. I expect more of your incognito trolling.

tic tac

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Originally posted by second:

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Why are you against Brexit, Second?

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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GET IT DONE, Boris. Hard Brexit. Soft Brexit. Shut up and do it.

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Then gather economic data to prove whether it was a good/bad idea. But Boris didn't want to know the numbers before Brexit.

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After Brexit, he probably won't collect data to finally know in his attempts to make sure nobody will ever be able to prove anything about Brexit. His government is already talking about “something that cannot be measured solely through spreadsheets or impact assessments, important though they are.” Boris does not want real numbers on those spreadsheets.

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Gotcha.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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