Brexit: A New Era for the UK?

[Jericho]

You Gov: ... the Guardian is seen as Britain’s most left-wing newspaper, closely followed by the Mirror...
.

LOL! You can't be serious.

YouGov?
The company formed by Ultra Right-wing conservative MP Nadim Zahawi (He who claimed back the expenses for heating his stables out of public funds, whilst happily ignoring the hungry and the homeless), that YouGov?

Well yes, by his lights, the Guardian would be considered 'left-wing'...But so would Genghis Khan!

Like I said, not as right-wing as most of the British press, but...

[obslam]

No problem, we can agree to disagree

[Stavros]

The problem is that 'left wing' has become a basket case term, in the sense that it is a basket into which people dump a lot of ideas and political positions they don't like which may or may not be 'left wing' if by that term reference is being made to various strands of Marxism, and secular or Christian Socialist ideas that owe no iineage to Karl and his disciples.

In the UK this ought to be a clearer lieage than it is, say, in the US, because the Socialist movemet had its roots either in the non-conformist Christian communities, many of them organized by artisans that emerged post-Cromwell with radical ideas about political representation and social justice; ori a similar cohort but one that owed less to Religious ideas but shared their ideas about liberty and representation, both of whom are discussed -at length- in EP Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963)

Thus, these two main strands fed into the Union movement that created the Labour Party, and one notes that both the 1945 Labour Manifesto, and (of all people) Denis Healey's commitment in 1974 to raise taxes 'to squeeze the rich until the pips squeak' would be unthinkable in Keir Starmer's Labour Party. Even ex-Trotskyist (?) John McDonnell had to disguise his 'transformative Revolution' so as not to frighten the horses, committing his party to maintaining low income tax, and the nonsense of tax thresholds where millions don't pay income tax at all, and the even more bizarre cop out of 'in work benefits'. Whatever happened to the idea that the workers should get the wages that are paid by their employers, rather than the taxpayer?

Brexit, in this context, as I insist, is a mess because hostility to the EU in its various forms has always divided our parties, but with the odious concept Corbyn was accused of, via Tony Benn, of a Little England mentality that in effect would have created a different version of Socialism in One Country. And to think that in the 1980s the hostility to the EU that was registered by the Telegraph and the Mail and the Sun was due to it being a Socialist organization!

Hence the confusion over The Guardian, which for years was the mouthpiece of the Liberal Party, but a confusion that is derived from the fact that Liberal Humanist policies on poverty, education, and nuclear weapons can be shared by voters of different parties. We have seen how many Conservatives are no longer bothered by same-sex marriage, and not only select, but vote for Black candidates in their constituencies, with memories of Taylor and Cheltenham now a distant and bitter memory. A former commander of a nuclear submarine -nor Lefty he- wrote an article for The Naval Review a few years ago insisting Trident should be scrapped because it is a useless piece of kit, and plenty of Tories, as they might once have been before being expelled by Mr Brexit, were supporters of the EU and the Single Market.

What we are left with, is the mirage of a country lost in a desert of its own making, seeing things that are not there, while the reality gnaws at its toes. Were it not for Covid, one wonders what the public discourse would be.

[Jericho]

Taking back control in a new era!

Boris Johnson’s controversial curbs on protests would “make a dictator blush” and show his Government’s liking for “authoritarianism”, MPs have warned.

The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill cleared its first parliamentary hurdle after receiving a second reading by 359 votes to 263, majority 96, despite opposition to several measures contained within it.

https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/po...-blush-258383/

[Stavros]

Taking back control in a new era!

/

The concern is with the man's contempt for truth and the law. His government declared it was going to break the law as if it didn't matter. He lied to Parliament last week and the censure from Mr Speaker was batted away like a fly, much as his disgraceful performance when Foreign Secretary helped send Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe to prison in Tehran, as if he cared, which he doesn't. The indifference to the war in Yemen, where aid has been cut, while arms sales to Saudi Arabia continue, doesn't in my view make him any better than Putin with his alliance with Asad, or Erdogan's illegal occupations of Cyprus and Syria -we seem to be moving into an era of tough guys at the helm who respond to criticism of their illegality with 'what are you going to do about it?' with the general response -nothing. To turn this cynical use of power on the domestic population is the logical continuation of the control mentality -and let's face it, are plain clothes bobbies going to infiltrate the WayOut club to make sure Jericho isn't harassing a Brazilian in a tight dress? Or sit in parked cars outside to make sure some weirdo isn't stalking the girls? Waste of money, but on which this Govt has form.

[Jericho]

They've curtailed our freedom of movement externally.
GRT communities are having their freedom of movement curtailed internally...And where's that going to lead to, who and what's next on that list, Papers bitte?
And I think the security services are going to be too busy legally raping, torturing and murdering (all in the name of security, of course) civilians, to worry about me harassing a Brazilian in a tight dress!
No doubt a little war would come in handy round about now. Not something too dirty or unpopular or big enough to drag on too long. Just big enough to get the flag shaggers shagging flags and take everybody's mind off of the utter fucking catastrophe that's been serco's track and trace (37 billion so far? Lucky the person running it is married to the conservative MP in charge of Anti-corruption).
And in such a heightened state of national security, we'll have to tighten the screws down a bit on the homefront.
All brought to you lie and in living colour by Andrew Neil and his latest venture, Gammon Broadcasting News.
I simply can't wait for Nigel to implore us to "dig for victory" five times a night!
Do you know what we need, MORE nuclear missiles...Oh WAIT!

Still, look on the bright side, eh!

[Stavros]

From the Single Market to Royal Navy gunboats patrolling the waters beween the Channel Island and France -I doubt anyone is surprised that Boris Johnson's incompetent management of the UK and the Brexit process has led to this crisis, his tenure of Downing St will be recorded in the future as 'The Years of Crisis' as he bumbles along from day to day without a plan. Michel Barnier in his latest book registers his shock at the fact that neither Theresa May nor Boris Johnson had a clear idea of what Brexit means in practice, knew little of EU procedures and laws, and that this meant a lot of frustration in the negtiations with the EU, with the UK always in a weak position because of its mix of ignorance and indifference to the actua consequences of Brexit.

There was a time when fishing rights around the Islands were governed by the Granville Bay Treaty, first signed in 1839 and amended in 2000, but it appears that this Treaty is now irrelevant, as the Channel Islands have taken advantage of the EU-UK Trade Agreement of 2020 which included clauses relating to the Channel Islands, thugh the CI were never members of the EU. In effect, it has enabled the CI since May 1st to issue licenses to fish and they have both attempted to limit the number of vessels allowed in CI waters, as well as quotas on the catch, and have done so without negotiating with the French though one assumes the UK Government was aware of the new licensing policy.

France has more boats than the CI, a point so obvious it ought not to need making. That the CI is taking matters into its own hands suggests that it is following the UK in deciding that inetrnational agreements are just pieces of paper that can be ignored when they feel like it, so the French threat to cut the link from the electricity grid to the CI is tit-fo-tat nonsense of the kind that led to the War of Jenkins Ear in 1739, though we have yet to encouner the War of Johnsons Ego, which may yet happen if the parties to this confict do not sit around a table and negotiate an amicabe agreement to replace Granville Bay.

An outline of the Channel Islands for those not famiiar with it-
https://www.sturgeonventures.com/bre...ey-and-jersey/

Some background on the conflict-
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-jersey-55467386
https://www.itv.com/news/channel/202...hannel-islands

[obslam]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-57008220

Yet more evidence from the Bank of England that Brexit is no bad thing economically.

[Stavros]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-57008220

Yet more evidence from the Bank of England that Brexit is no bad thing economically.

Superficial evidence that even your source admits- "Mr Bailey cautioned that the surge in output would only return the UK economy back its 2019 size" -which he then adds "is good news".

He makes no mention of the £1.7 trillion that has left the UK - along with over 7,000 jobs in the financial sector- to find a safe haven in EU banks because he doesn't want to admit that the men moving it out, men such as Jacob Rees-Mogg, in doing so are exiting the UK because they don't believe Brexit will be good for their business.

Where is the mention of the simple fact that UK firms are desperate for a re-negotiation of the EU-UK Trade Agreement because 'tariff-free' access to the EU has become, as a matter of fact, a forest of expensive bureaucratic regulation that is damagin business?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...-b1842645.html

And where is the long term analysis of the labour market for a country which has seen the promise of electric vehicle manufacture in Pen-y-Bont re-located to France, with other businesses re-locating to the EU such as the Netherlands? As the paper linked below points out, industry in Germany, Netherlands and Belgium survived the 1980s through a re-structuring that did not take place in the UK -there, jobs and communities surivived -here, they were sacrificed on the altar of 'Market Forces' -but as the paper points out, and as the conflict with Jersey and France also shows -for the one fact about fishing is that it is an industry where markets don't work- the Brexit Dream of liberated markets is already being replaced by the State, indeed, the author argues the State must command the economy-

"History never truly repeats itself, and the Covid response will take a different shape, no doubt, than the 1980s wave of restructuring. But if there is one thing to be learned from that decade, out of which Germany and its economic satellites emerged in pretty good shape and the UK with an ever-increasing trade deficit, a parasitic financial sector and a politically alienated, disenfranchised working class, it is that such large waves of restructuring are best not left to the market. It offers short-term solutions when you need long-term thinking and destroys viable livelihoods without alternatives as a result. Without supporting institutions in place, the market is simply too thin a framework for coordinating economic action.

The furlough schemes that many governments in Europe and beyond introduced at the start of the pandemic were therefore a step in the right direction. In countries where companies and social partners have dense arrangements for labour market governance, the private sector can be left more or less on its own to think about the labour markets of the future, perhaps helped by a little nudge from governments.
When these underlying conditions are absent, however, government’s role becomes all the more important, financially as well as organisationally. The UK government got the first act right; but sadly, in contrast to other countries, where governments are keeping the tap open until the worst of the crisis is behind us, it is on track to repeat the mistakes of the 1980s. Covid has already hit the left behind communities hard; it would be a folly to kick them economically now that they are down. We know now where that can lead."
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2...fter-covid-19/

From the largest Single Market in the world, to State Power backed up by Military Force -this is what Brexit has given us. It is a failure of politics, diplomacy and economics.

[obslam]

He makes no mention of the £1.7 trillion that has left the UK - along with over 7,000 jobs in the financial sector- to find a safe haven in EU banks because he doesn't want to admit that the men moving it out, men such as Jacob Rees-Mogg, in doing so are exiting the UK because they don't believe Brexit will be good for their business.

Total fantasy, as far more funds and jobs have come into the UK financial sector than have gone out. I work in The City.