fahrenheit451:366

Thus spake Guardian Online  :

At the stroke of 11 p.m. on 31 January (midnight in Brussels), the UK ceases to be a member of the EU. The divorce is sealed. The only way back is an application to rejoin.

The UK enters an 11-month transition period to allow time to negotiate a new relationship. That means staying in the EU single market, its customs union and paying into its budget.
 A more significant moment could be 1 January 2021, the UK’s first day outside EU rules. Under the Brexit withdrawal agreement, that day could be delayed until 2022 or 2023, but Johnson has ruled out any extension of the transition period.

Postscript:

17.4 million British Voters altered the course of History on June 23 2016.

Three and a  half years later,after the most virulently egregious political campaigning seen in Europe post-1945,the democratically expressed Will of the British electorate to Leave the EU shall come to pass.

After all the vituperative lies,slander and calumny heaped upon those who Voted Leave; after all the insidious,politicised  interference and legalistic chicanery from a plethora of metropolitan City shysters via the EU/Soros funded stalking horse Gina Miller's challenge to Article 50 and the Judges of the Supreme Court itself;to say nothing of the debauched and deranged machinations of a parliament in terminal chaos and confusion accentuated by the anti-brexit Premier May's imbecilic party political miscalculations,after ALL of that..

The British people have won,Brexit has triumphed,History has been altered.

Hallelujah! and Amen!

fahrenheit451:351

Oh boy...

British Prime Minister Johnson reneged conclusively on his earlier solemn promise to actually die in a ditch if his government couldn't deliver Brexit on October 31st and that he wouldn't go back to EU to ask for an extension.

The EU have helpfully referred to their grand gesture as  a " flextension " and it is valid until January 31st. 2020, which of course is way past the original deadline of October 31.

We are now all hostages being held in a parliamentary purgatory where every conceivable ideological schism is surfacing in all the major parties and there are schisms within schisms.

In the round of course, the Remain campaign succeeded ages ago in effectively torpedoing Brexit.

The waves of Waitrose /Ocado home delivery loyalists and their pithily adorned placards with slogans had sod all to do with the effectiveness of the EU funded, largely Labour Party directed, seditionist enterprise that so remorselessly undermined and heinously traduced what had been the electorally triumphant Leave campaign and all those who voted Leave on June 23  2016.

What began as a farce has evolved into an ever greater farce.Public political discourse has been utterly debased and the very operation of our constitutional parliamentary system have been laid waste.

In those two aspects, the Remoaner zealots and their controlling Masters must feel that they've succeeded beyond their own wildest imaginings.

To be perfectly frank ,earnest and above board on the topic of " General Election or no General Election "...

I simply couldn't care less.

fahrenheit451:341

October 31st. had better eventuate. We had better Leave the EU on that date.

Just when you thought the interminably egregious, otiose cant and vacuous moralistic slogans of the EU funded seditionist Remain aka Peoples Vote campaign couldn’t delve any further into uncharted depths of paranoid delusion…

Corporate MSM and other platforms announce that, ” A judge sitting in Scotland’s highest civil court has rejected an interim interdict (injunction) to prevent to the suspension of parliament. Lord Doherty said he believed the full hearing set down for next Friday should be moved forward to Tuesday or Wednesday.”

The judicial foray in Edinburgh is contemporaneous with virtually similar legalistic manoeuvres in London and Belfast.

Parliament is being prorogued.Only this time, for the first time since Oliver Cromwell ,significant and influential sections of our metropolitan domiciled liberal europhile elite are keen to bring the uneducated masses into the polemical fray by dispensing their very own bowdlerised explanation of what is a pretty arcane, customary and heretofore uneventful parliamentary / constitutional mechanism.

Having insidiously slandered, defamed and demonised the 17.4 million, with a pathological intensity not heard since Josef Goebbels apogee ,the EU funded seditionist cabal are finding themselves desperately short of any appropriately nuanced denunciations of Prime Minister Johnson and his government. 

Even the customary bulk Remaoner hashtags have lapsed into quasi-comedic parody, simply through lack of editorial oversight;

#NoDealBrexit is trending as #NoDealBreixt and #StopTheCoup went sideways twice as #StopTheCoupe and #StopTheCoop .

The already lamentably procrastinating parliamentary persiflage lapsed quickly into the piteous ,uni-student common room agitator-manque speak ,best embodied by that fat stupid Scots twerp Ian Blackford whose record is stuck on calling our Prime Minister as a dictator.

And way too many Labour /other left commentators and academics self identifying as “marxist” have established now beyond reasonable dialectical doubt that they in fact have never been or are even remotely now, Marxist.

fahrenheit451:339

If muskets and halberds were to hand,then all sides in the Brexit debate would by now have resorted to using them.

The current version of Leave / Remain -whatever happens next ,has the UK bidding the 27 adieu on October 31st.

And,of course the interminable exchange of invective and partisan ideological opinion,half-truth  and intemperate persiflage continues unabated; only the hashtags have changed and continue to do so over time.

#Yellowhammer refers to the cache of civil service documents exploring  possible scenarios of economic difficulties the UK might encounter following our actual departure from the EU,were it to go ahead,on October 31.

#RecallParliament is the cri de coeur of disparate forces under the Remain banner who are convinced that Prime Minister Johnson will in effect force the UK into what they feel is a wholly precipitous departure from the EU on October 31 via potential machinations involving what might be considered violations of acceptable parliamentary procedure.

However the  “Public Law for Everyone ” site sheds some considerable insight and understanding on the entire constitutional imbroglio. Herewith gleaned in full…

• POSTED ONAUGUST 18, 2019

The Brexit Secretary says he has “set in stone” the repeal of the European Communities Act 1972 — but the legal significance of this misleading claim is very limited

Earlier today, the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, Stephen Barclay MP, posted a tweet saying that he had “signed the legislation setting in stone the repeal” of the European Communities Act 1972 (ECA). (The ECA is the UK statute that gives effect to EU law in the UK’s domestic legal system.) He went on to assert that this is a “landmark moment” because it “underlines that we are leaving the EU on 31 October”.

Steve Barclay MP

@SteveBarclay

I have signed the legislation setting in stone the repeal of the European Communities Act 1972. This is a landmark moment in taking back control of our law. It underlines that we are leaving the EU on October 31.

At best, this is misleading. All that Barclay has done is to bring into force section 1 of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 (EUWA). It says that: “The European Communities Act 1972 is repealed on exit day.” However, the effect of bringing section 1 into effect is decidedly modest. Most importantly — and, given the wording of the section, obviously — bringing that provision into force does not immediately repeal the ECA: rather, it only repeals it on “exit day”. “Exit day” is currently defined by section 20(1) of the Act as 31 October. But other provisions in section 20 enable the definition of “exit day” to be amended if the date of the UK’s departure from the EU changes under EU Law. Indeed, this is precisely what happened when extensions to the Article 50 period were agreed between the UK and the European Council in the spring.

There is no legal reason why this could not happen again — and, crucially, bringing section 1 of the EUWA into force makes absolutely no difference to this point. Whether section 1 is in force or not, it only produces legal effects from “exit day”. It follows that if, for example, Parliament were to require the Government to seek, and if the European Council were to grant, a further Article 50 extension, the definition of “exit day” could be further amended in order to ensure that the ECA was repealed only with effect from the new, later date of the UK’s departure from the EU.  This, in turn, means that — contrary to his claim — the Brexit Secretary has not “set in stone” the repeal of the ECA. The EUWA explicitly contemplates that “exit day” can be changed in order to enable it to be aligned with the actual date of the UK’s departure from the EU.

This leads on to a further, and critical, point. “Exit day” is a concept whose relevance liis wholly in domestic law. It is the date on which various provisions of the EUWA swing into action, in order to ensure that the domestic legal consequences of leaving the EU are appropriately managed — including by converting vast swathes of EU law into domestic law. However, the domestic definition of “exit day” has no bearing whatever on when and whether the UK leaves the EU. That is a matter that is governed exclusively by EU law. Similarly, whether the ECA is in force or not has no bearing on whether or when the UK leaves the EU — although if the UK were to repeal the ECA before leaving the EU, it would immediately be in breach of EU law. From this, it follows that whether the ECA is repealed or not is neither here nor there when it comes to whether or when the UK leaves the EU. All it is relevant to is whether, for as long as it remains a member, the UK does or does not comply with the legal obligations under the EU Treaties that are binding on it in international law.

All of this demonstrates that the legal significance of bringing section 1 of the EUWA into force is extremely limited. It does not “set in stone” the repeal of the ECA, because the legal meaning of “exit day” can be changed and the date of the ECA’s repeal deferred. It does not prevent the UK Government from seeking an Article 50 extension. It does not prevent Parliament from legislating to require the UK Government to seek an Article 50 extension. It does not prevent the European Council from granting an extension if the UK Government asks for one, whether of its own volition or at Parliament’s insistence. And it does not prevent Parliament, if it so wishes, from legislating to revoke the UK’s notification under Article 50, thereby stopping the Brexit process in its tracks. The politics, of course, are another thing. But any suggestion that ECA repeal has been “set in stone”, or that this somehow locks in 31 October as the inevitable date of the UK’s departure from the EU, is wrong as a matter of law. ECA repeal, and Brexit itself, are no more “set in stone” today than they were in the spring, when “exit day” was twice redefined in domestic law and the Article 50 period was twice extended as a matter of EU law.

And so it goes…

fahrenheit451:336

Well,the UK has a new Prime Minister and all the usual suspects are making all the usual noises

.Just a little over 3 years ago, had Gove not betrayed Johnson's candidature for the leadership then we would have been spared the ReMAYner interregnum,the complete bollox-up of the 2017 General Election and yes,the UK would have left the EU .

The metropolitan,globalist elitist staged EU -funded pantomime however refuses to leave the stage of history and has persisted over these last 3 years to produce ever more absurd mise-en-scenes. An endless stream of tropes and slogans of treachery and betrayal have been injected into the political discourse that followed the EURef2016 triumph for Leave aka Brexit.

It's worth reminding ourselves what depths of hysteria the globalist corporations plumbed in their role as the battering ram for the Remain /Peoples Vote seditionist campaign. On this day 25 July 2018  I posted in fahrenheit451:336 :-

Laugh or cry ? The Times  online reports:-

The head of Amazon in the UK has said that there could be “civil unrest” within two weeks if  the UK leaves the European Union with no deal. Amazon UK became the first business to issue such a warning. It was given at a meeting on Friday 20 July organised by Dominic Raab, the new Brexit secretary. Doug Gurr, UK manager for the American online giant, told the other guests, who included representatives of Britain’s biggest businesses, that this worst-case outcome formed part of his contingency planning. **************************************************************************************************************************************
 The problem with the aforegoing tendentious remarks is, that in common with so many other similar stark warnings these last two years,the Remain campaign simply repeats itself ad nauseam.

Which of course is  part of their grand propaganda strategy initiated long before the 23 June EU Referendum ever took place. The seditionist cabal of metropolitan elitist Remoaner EU shills ( hope that covers everything about them ) have been rendered utterly deaf and insensate by their own ideological echo chamber.

Much in the same way that Dr.Josef Goebbels was when asking the assembled Party faithful if they wanted Total Victory -at a stage in WW2 when it was already over,done and dusted bar the shouting.
The neoliberal EU regime requires freedom of movement for surplus labour,without this facility the REC Job Agencies in the UK would be unable to run their lucrative Zero Hours contracts trade which primarily ” employ ” the economically displaced millions of jobless cozening itinerants from rustbelt eastern europe and the balkans who have in effect colonised large swathes of the UK and are eagerly sharing their common european values of stealing other peoples jobs and enjoying the luxury of houses and schools places and health services previously paid for by others.

And to cap the entire week off ,former Anglican Tea Lady of the Year and  Remoaner EU Shill-in-Chief ,Theresa May made an official announcement that she would take the lead in the Leave EU negotiations,relegating the role of Brexit Secretary to that of bootblack.

And so it goes…. 

fahrenheit451:335

With a putative Prime Minister ready to push the parliamentary /constitutional button on  "Leave " and hordes of his own Tory party MPs ready to help Labour et al push the no-confidence button on him; the interminable " Mexican stand-off" on Brexit continues.

Herewith my original blog posted on July 18 2018 ( fahrenheit451:270 ) at a time when the current on -going Mexican Stand-off was just getting under way.

Rats in a sack.

Brexit might have already been consigned to constitutional oblivion by the metropolitan domiciled globalist ruling elites,but at least their paid-for political actors class are still managing to tear each other to shreds in what is supposed to be a staged re-enactment but is quite entertainingly going terribly wrong.
The under-rehearsed participants are actually believing themselves to be in a real world authentic constitutional political struggle,which of course from the audience /spectators’ point of view they are not,only seeming to be so for the sake of parliamentary verisimilitude.
A series of keenly contested highly disputatious votes was summarised by BBC ONline as:-

WHAT THE MPS VOTED ON

The amendments were “broadly in line” with government policy, which is why the government accepted them.
By 305 votes to 302 – with 14 Tories rebelling – MPs backed an amendment that prevents the UK from collecting taxes on behalf of the EU, unless the rest of the EU does the same for the UK.
Applying EU tariffs to products destined for the EU is part of Mrs May’s plan to avoid friction at UK borders after Brexit.
Another amendment, to ensure the UK is out of the EU’s VAT regime, was backed by 303 to 300, with a Tory rebellion of 11.
Three Labour MPs voted with the government.
The government won several other votes more comfortably, and the entire bill was then approved by the House of Commons by 318 to 285.

The Conservative/Labour duopoly itself, as entrenched defenders of the archaic FPTP which keeps them eternally as the two major parties,seems to be have been cast into existential doubt during the course of the parliamentary imbroglio of recent days. Leading Conservatives such as Dominic Grieve and Anna Soubry supported by leading Labour EU shills,openly advocate a government of national unity to replace the present ailing May minority regime.

Suffice it to say ” Schadenfreude ” ;at least for now.

Footnote:
And we now know what became of Anna Soubry and her fellow dissidents in the Tory and Labour parties and their abortive non-realignment of British party politics.

fahrenheit451:334

In the rest of the world it's July 2019 but meanwhile back in Britain we're currently reliving March 29 2019 - the day,which according to the Law as enacted by parliament,said that the UK was to Leave the EU.

And still the global metropolitan elitist pantomime continues unabated.The Tories are about to select one of two barely competent careerist clowns as their next party leader and the UK's Prime Minister.

Their,now soon to be, predecessor gave her valedictory interview in which she confirmed everything that anyone with even half a grasp of  Realpolitik already knew.She really is a politically inept,spineless, wheedling caricature of a petty bourgeois waste of space.

And meanwhile the Fenian statelet run from Dublin was coming face to face with its own revelation of a Realpolitik moment.That moment when an insignificant failed nation state realises its own utter insignificance in the larger world of politics and international diplomacy.

Having spent decades kowtowing and generally sucking up to the German / French EU hegemons -allowing Ireland's naively conceived sovereignty to be pimped out by the Berlin -Paris Axis for the sake of Euro fiscal discipline ,having only done so on the understanding of being treated favourably in the future;the 1 euro-shop De Valera Fenians wake up to the ineluctable reality of getting thrown under the proverbial bus of what is the EU -Mrecosur free trade deal.

So much for having acted the willing ( if overly venal posturing martinet whilst doing so) shill  for Germany in its calculated strategy of crippling  the UK's departure from the EU by creating out of thin air the imbroglio of a " backstop " for a farm track border non-issue bereft of any actual material or other importance other than to Republican tobacco,alcohol and red diesel smugglers.

Poor old misunderstood,somewhat plausibly contrite Theresa of the Lachrymose Countenance ; poor old Ireland and its practitioners of an iron age form of runic alphabet. Schadenfreude!!

fahrenheit451:262

On March 2019, the UK's decades long membership of the European Union ends.

And then there's a transition period which the May Minority regime has negotiated in order to appease pro-EU Corporate interests. The CBI and others conjured up the utterly preposterous chimera of an economic /financial " cliff edge " that would do for the UK economy were such a transition period not in place.

And so on and so forth.

The House of Commons has embroiled itself in a legislative mess worthy of the mythic augean stables.
So Brexit in all likelihood is not going to take place,The only caveat to that is the innate cowardice of the ruling elites and their political class who, here in the UK,are historically incapable of telling it like it is to the people,especially when it comes to betraying the people's trust.

Clarity and decisiveness in political leadership and governance are utterly alien to the UK. History is littered with great turning points,pivotal to all succeeding societal development,being adulterated through weakness and procrastination.

And conformist/aspirational middle class dramaturgy is the battlefield for the not terribly convincing performances of ideological contention.

The Conservatives are split,Labour even more so on Leave,Remain and even on what kind of Leave and what kind of Remain. The Labour shadow cabinet under Corbyn has just recorded  its 103rd.individual resignation - that total is virtually half the number of Labour MPs .90% of the parliamentary Labour party have since Corbyn's election as leader. supported formal motions of no confidence in their own Party leader.

Faction above Party and Party above Country is endemic and institutionally entrenched through the maintetnance of the moribund and archaic First Past the Post electoral system.the most glaring and egregious dysfunctioning of which was highlighted starkly by the General election of 2015,where the 3rd placed party,UKIP gained 12% of the popular vote and only 1 seat.

The AfD with a similar vote share is now the largest single opposition party in Germany, ( their moribund decrepit Socialist Party  being in another Grand Coalition with Merkel's CDU ).

But we're not in Germany or Austria,Italy,France,Holland,Hungary,Czechia,Poland,Norway,Sweden,Denmark,Finland ( where Socialist and Liberal parties are now in irreversible historic decline ) where the much sneered at by Anglo-Saxon liberal elites' " populists " aren't so much a surge but a full blown tsunami of political revolt.

And so the very moment of the single most egregious historic betrayal of the British people in modern times is at hand.

Cry " Havoc!"..

fahrenheit451:260

Had the Conservatives in their 2015 GE manifesto promised to hold,if returned to office, an advisory only referendum on UK membership of the EU -history really would have turned out ...portentous crescendo of music... a bit different,but not much.

They chose,instead with full cross party parliamentary agreement to make the result of the Referendum binding.The itinerant Westminster careerist benchwarmers believed,even as they promulgated this measure, that the 23 June 2016 EU Referendum would come out in favour of Remain.The entirety of the metropolitan domiciled ruling elites ,the entire Oxbridge / Public School alumni that constitutes the MSM Commentariat - all knew for certain that the Electorate when asked to approve of the UK remaining  a servile satrapy of the EU,would give their supine consent at the ballot box,no problem.

Except of course, that they didn't. The majority of the Electorate chose instead to exercise their too often muted sovereign will by asking to be set free from the yoke of EU bondage and for the release of Great Britain from the serfdom of the 4th.German Reich.

And for the next two years,the metropolitan elites unleashed a continuous propaganda barrage of unmitigated class-hatred savagery toward ordinary working class people and all those who expressed even a modicum of traditional amiable, patriotism and had,in the elites' view made a mistake in voting Leave.

The Religious Reformation of the mid -16th .Century and then the Parliamentary v. Monarchical Absolutism engendered Civil War of the 1630s and 40s are probably the nearest comparable historical episodes to the present interminable constitutional imbroglio that has consumed almost the entirety of the UK polity in dissension,factionalism,mutual antipathy and unreason.

The Remain campaign has proven to be the more determined of the two.It has used the bigger lies,the greater misinformation and the more vituperative slanderous mis-characterisation of their opponents in the Leave side than has been the case vice versa.

Ultimately The Reformation ended up,in hindsight as a dog-eared,pretty much heavily adulterated theological compromise that fell far too short of being genuinely Protestant as envisaged by either Luther or Calvin and which would have made for a far better and purer modernity and Society. Equally the English Civil War period delivered far less than had  been aspired to by so many.Annual parliaments,universal male suffrage etc. Though many substantial reforms did actually occur,the monarchy was back by 1660.

And so we come to it...more portentous music....on June 12. Though he prattles on in his usual peremptory condescending Blairite metropolitan elitist manner -as if June 23 had never happened, leading EU shill Labour MP and Remainer Chuka Umunna ,said: "It is absolutely outrageous for the government to allocate just one day to a debate that promises to be crucial for the future of our country."

"This is a shameful attempt by the government to avoid difficult questions about the chaotic mess they've made of the Brexit negotiations."

And perhaps he's got a valid point.

The rest including the latest egregious faux-pas from Boris Johnson is simply theatre,another act in a pantomime slowly unwinding from the fabric or the reality of our everyday lives and concerns.

The People shall not forget this treasonable betrayal of their Sovereign will,neither shall they forgive those who carried out that betrayal.

Bring on the Schadenfreude,it's time.

fahrenheit451:255

The Anglophobic,or should we say anti-British sentiment that has suffused Irish political and cultural discourse since time immemorial has attained its zenith.
The Fenian Kneecappers and Bombers and their misbegotten offspring have ascended their very own allegorical Calvary and are awaiting their own imminent resurrection as foretold in the annals of terrorism and bloodshed.
That quintessentially obtuse and arcane shibboleth known as  " The Irish Border Question " has been parlayed into the defining problematic on which the UK's brexit from the EU is now ordained to founder catastrophically.

The Irish Times reported on November 21,2017 :-

After a heated Bundestag debate, Germany voted yesterday to back Ireland’s request to restructure crisis-era loans and save the exchequer an estimated €150 million.

The request from Dublin turned into a proxy battle between Germany’s two leading parties, which are locked in a growing coalition battle.

Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) backed Ireland’s request, along with the Greens and the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), calling Ireland a model crisis country.

Amazingly shortly thereafter, the EU's puppet regime in Dublin commenced to orchestrate with commendable alacrity its very own Greek Chorus on the UK's admittedly,feeble,procrastinating attempt at negotiating what is termed Brexit from the EU.
Labour, ( metropolitan elitist,Blairite and Corbynite alike ) and its supine Trades Union running dogs and all the collected detritus of anti-British Irish politics lined up squarely behind The Kneecappers & Bombers aka Sinn Fein and their demented but only marginally less odious political cousins in the republic.
The allure of donning the mantle of messiah -manque has proven too much.for the intellectual leprechauns of irish tribal politics. And Juncker,Tusk and Barnier have played an absolute blinder against ,again admittedly, an all too obviously vertebrae-deficient UK government.

And so Brexit and all the promises made that the Referendum result would be implemented,blah.blah are about to be taken out and executed at dawn.

Expressions of Schadenfreude might be appropriate at this juncture,but for what reason, I don't know.

fahrenheit451:254

In a few weeks time,it will be two years since the historic Referendum on the UK's continued membership of the EU took place.

Leave or Remain.That was the choice placed before the sovereign British electorate.Leave meant,explicitly, the UK leaving the customs union and the single market.

Literally no-one in the corridors of power,either in Whitehall or in Parliament actually believed that the British people would vote to Leave the EU.No-one.Not a single bureaucrat nor any department prepared any plans for such a contingency and neither were they asked to by anyone in government.
Well,it seems that two years on from that historic day the notionally defeated Remain campaign may have triumphed regardless of having only polled 48% of the votes cast.

The British 23 June referendum looks increasingly likely to be added to the long list of referendums conducted by EU member states over the years that somehow,invariably end up being disregarded,annulled or simply re-run.

The UK Deep State is hydra-headed,chopping off one head doesn't do it.The metropolitan-domiciled, Oxbridge academics,political class,commentariat,experts and industry leaders threw everything at the Leave campaign during the referendum and carried on afterwards by throwing even more including the proverbial kitchen sink at " brexit ".

They - The Remoaners - did manage to turn a sow's ear of an argument over mundane facts and figures into a looming existentialist crisis. They did this by quite simply telling the most brazen lies imaginable on every conceivable issue and problem arising from the UK exiting the EU.
They also might just about get away with this coup d'etat-by-stealth,the to all intents and purposes annulment of brexit if their luck holds.The question arises as to whether or not the Remoaners' luck will hold.
They're gambling that the widespread acceptance of parliamentary politics and representation as legitimate amongst the electorate will still prevail after the betrayal of Brexit occurs.

This presents an interesting dilemma for our metropolitan ruling elites and their political class.And given their previous form,they are very unlikely to have any contingencies in place when it all really does go tits up on them.

fahrenheit451:250

The other day  Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote a stinging jeremiad in the Telegraph denouncing the shenanigans of the metropolitan elite and their political class as they carry out their historic treasonable betrayal of the British electorate's verdict delivered in the June 23 Referendum. Plus ca change! That was always going to be their end game. Truth is that it is the Labour Party & Trades Union movement that bears the greater shame and culpability in the treason itself than any other party or movement.

As I said in an earlier blog posting.....

 

APRIL 26, 2016 BY LOUISKASATKIN1

And So It Goes…#765

There’s a little over another 8 weeks of nose to tail electoral campaigning to endure before we finally get to cast our ballots on June 23. And the blizzard of increasingly vacuous and contentious statements and reciprocal point-scoring is inexorably gathering pace. We have become unaccustomed to mature,nuanced,indeed clever political badinage and rhetoric here in the formerly ” great ” britain. Instead we’ve allowed ourselves to be alternately hectored and lectured by a seemingly endless cavalcade of preening,fatuous wannabe poseurs and parliamentary arrivistes who are for the most part are utterly devoid of even the merest scintilla of statesmanship and popular political acumen that might influence and resonate with the ordinary citizenry and electorate.
The EU Referendum debate,such as it is is being soundly buffeted by verbiage and flimsy assertions coming at it from all conceivable ideological and Party directions.For Labour it is essentially a tribal struggle vis a vis the Conservatives.Their worn out,dessicated mantras are being dusted off and brought back into circulation,wrapped in a faux-nostalgia and counterfeit,superficial class politics that long ago ceased to have any traction in the world post Thatcher-Blair. Following on from Shadow Foreign secretary Benn’s wildly delusional and idiosyncratic exposition of his tenuous grasp of modern history during the ” May we bomb Syria “debate ;Alan Johnson follows Benn into going over the top on an equally implausible rhetorical suicide mission underscoring the axiom that truth is the first casualty in war,but in Johnston’s case as in Benn’s earlier,Meaning itself is the biggest casualty of all. Gleaned from the eponymous Labour List site,Tuesday 26 April. :-
” The EU referendum is as important as the General Election of 1945, Alan Johnson says today in a rallying speech to trade unionists.
The “immediate consequences” of Brexit would harm both the country and society as a whole, the chair of Labour In For Britain is expected to warn at the Usdaw conference later today.
“I believe the vote in the referendum on the EU on June 23 is every bit as important as that election in July 1945. Perhaps more so,” Johnson will say.
“It is a vote about whether we remain or leave the EU, and there will be immediate consequences to that decision for everyone here, and every family in the land.  But it’s about more than that.  For me, it’s about what kind of country we are, what kind of society we want to be.”
“Nearly four million British trade union members are represented by unions campaigning to keep Britain in Europe this June.
“From nurses and builders, to railway workers, steel workers, postal workers and shop workers, trade unions will be campaigning for a Britain that Remains in Europe.
“The rights of working people are protected by our EU membership..”
This is absurdist installation performance art on an epic scale.Benn ‘s verbal necromancy sought to conjure the ghosts of a largely misunderstood Spanish Civil War of the 1930’s -here Johnson trumps even that vainglorious essay with: “I believe the vote in the referendum on the EU on June 23 is every bit as important as that election in July 1945. Perhaps more so,”  The meds have clearly kicked in and someone ought to fetch the Nurse.
More important than the general election of 1945 ? The absolute zenith of Labour Party/Trades Union reformist mythology second only to the Keir Hardie Creation myth.And Johnson has gone and erased from the collective,historic working class memory absolutely everything else.The coup de grace being his repeating the outright figment of Blairite imagination,that ” The rights of working people are protected by our EU membership “.
Theologically this would count as Apostasy or even Heresy coming from within the Vatican itself. And we all know what should happen to Heretics.

fahrenheit451:249

It should be noted that the EU Withdrawal negotiations led by the May regime have to all intents and purposes utterly betrayed the verdict delivered by the EU Referendum of 23 June 2016.

Not a single scintilla of discernible advantage has been accrued by the UK during the seemingly, but not quite, interminable Leave negotiations.Nothing whatsoever.For all the venal,hubristic posturing and indiscriminate use of diplomatic hyperbole and cant from all three sides in the Withdrawal negotiations,nothing to paraphrase Bob Dylan, has been delivered.

Three sides,you say? The EU ,the official UK and if you hadn't already noticed the unofficial UK aka the Remain campaign. they have  carried on ever since the dawn of the 24 June 2016 as if in fact it was they that had triumphed in the referendum irrespective of the empirically verifiable numerical disadvantage recorded for posterity on the day itself.

Days after that irritating,shabby little twerp Donald Tusk  ( with pretensions of being some kind of latter day reincarnation of Marshal Pilsudski ) goes about telling the UK off,yet again, for its continuing negotiating stance on the so-called " Irish Border Post Brexit " , the House of Lords decides to throw all of its toys out of the pram.

It's like watching a prison riot consisting of alzheimers patients.Most of them have difficulty recognising the person speaking or where they themselves are most of the time.

The H.oL. latest jape was to vote through an amendment which graphically illustrates the dangerous antipathy toward democracy they and their metropolitan elitist political class feel. The amendment which goes back to the House of Commons for further debate ( with the danger of it actually being accepted by a majority of those itinerant benchwarmers ) forces the UK to seek to enter a Customs Union relationship with the EU.

The term non-sequitur springs to mind,but given the Alice-In-Wonderland tropes that the entire Brexit process has been subsumed in,one can never tell.

The Remoaners aka metroplitan seditionists & EU shills ( many posing as the government itself pretending to want to carry out the ineluctable democratic mandate of the British electorate but in reality having no intention whatsoever of actually doing so ) are of course giddier than a chimpanzees tea party that's just drunk all the Kool-aid in one great big gulp.

Matron will be having words with them in the morning after having had to change their bedsheets so often during the night.

fahrenheit451:242

The UK's Tory minority regime is currently embroiled  in a convoluted existential mess and finding itself in the proverbial hole,has opted to carry on digging.

Russia has now been elevated to the vaunted status of grave threat to the international order and future security of the european continent. This Will O'the Wisp has been latterly conjured up by the embattled Tory Austerity regime, caught as it is between a rock and a hard place - the rock of national betrayal of the vote to Leave the EU and the rock of diplomatic and military impotence and delusion in the wider world.

Regarding the matter of immediate domestic concern to the metropolitan-domiciled ruling elites,that of maintaining the EU's supremacy over the British people,it has taken the faux-adversaries of Remain and Leave a little while to finesse and implement their joint strategy for a de-facto annulment of the verdict of the June 2016 EU Referendum.

But in spite of some efforts to honour and implement said verdict to Leave, the combined forces of mendacity,hypocrisy and servile loyalty to a hostile foreign power - the EU - have at last managed to cobble together a transition deal. This transition deal pretends to extend the interim period of time from the expiry of Article 50 at the end of March 2019 to December 2020 for there to be no, imaginary, cliff edge exodus from the confines of the EU that might have,had we ever really gone ahead with it,been an economic shock of trading on WTO rules following the UK's departure-which in any event is now confirmed as never ever going to eventuate.

The very same mendacious invertebrates who for generations now have singularly failed to defend and promote the interests of the British people vis a vis the EU, are now posing themselves as hardened Cold War hawks ready to engage Russia.

Boris Johnson the EU Leave campaign's leader-manque who impugned and denigrated the EU and all its institutions so viscerally is now at the front of the UK's campaign to get the self same EU to stand shoulder to shoulder against the imminent,highly implausible threat coming from Russia.
The yawning gap in credibility is even at this distance plain for all to see.

Treachery at home,discarding the democratic vote of the Electorate is coupled with resorting to infantile posturing that passes for international diplomacy abroad.

Drawing parallels between the FIFA World Cup 2018 in Russia with the Berlin Olympics of 1936 in Nazi Germany is of course another way of making sure that fuses are lit.

fahrenheit451:238

February 28 has the EU's chief Brexit negotiator Barnier laying down the law to the Minority UK regime vis a vis the EU's stance on the conduct and preferred timetable for the remainder of the UK/EU Leave negotiations.

The pro- Minority regime press and media platforms cavil about the EU's supposed attempts at wishing to annex Northern Ireland and in doing so break apart the United Kingdom. Even the most jaundiced genuine brexiteer finds this accusation going a hyperbole too far.It's not 1938 and the Irish Border problematic isn't a re-run of the Sudetenland or Austria.

Had the then still majority UK Tory government gone ahead and triggered Article 50 as was anticipated within hours of the EU referendum result,then all this would be speculative persiflage instead of which we're now stuck in someone else's nightmare scenario for us.

The only rational course of action for this now Minority Regime would be to disengage from the EU's  Leave process and boldly go to full WTO rules.That noble if somewhat tenuous scenario is itself predicated on the purely hypothetical presumption that the minority government is itself committed to delivering Brexit.

It however isn't.

In the minority status or as a parliamentary majority it was in before May stuffed things up with a woefully imbecilic call for  a general election to reinforce her majority prior to the Leave process commencement.

It make me wonder whether the true intention was in fact to make Brexit even more unlikely with such a machiavellian coup-de-main.

Not that Labour are faring any better under the stresses and strains of assuaging its own  competing interests factions. Labour is home to MPs from the top ten constituencies that voted Leave as well as the top  ten constituencies that voted Remain. Though some 90% of all Labour MPs actively espouse Remain.Only in that context does Corbyn's most recent foray into the realm of cogent public policy pronouncements make any sense.

The declared contents of Corbyn i.e. Remoaner Labour's put them firmly on the EU's side of the negotiations.

Brexit,ladies and gentlemen, is getting buried a little deeper with every day that passes.

fahrenheit451:237

The full and final betrayal of the British electorate's verdict on June 23 2016 to Leave the EU is now imminent.

The minority Tory regime held, what was ironically termed by their supine kowtowing lackey Press as, a  " war cabinet " at Chequers, to finalise the otiose cant and non sequitur verbiage that will shortly be broadcast/published outlining the precise details of how this Grand Betrayal ,this Act of monumental Treason is to be enacted.

There is no longer any need for the Labour Party to strive to return to power when the Tories-manque are doing precisely what Labour would do plus a little bit more besides for good measure and so outflank their adversaries in parliament.A parliament that decide long before 23 June 2016 that the plebs could go and get stuffed.

The leading metropolitan Remoaner /seditionist EU shill Mary Creagh, the itinerant benchwarmer for Wakefield,must be beside herself at this prospect;if indeed someone with so huge a grossly inflated ego can ever find space to be able to in fact be besides themselves.

Only the other day,Our Blessed Mary of the Reduced Majority,hurled her usual otiose cant into the HoC echo chamber, " If the UK leaves the EU ",she began. If? If? Given the brazen cowardice of the Minority Tory Regime in its spectacularly blatant endeavours to fail to carry out the verdict of the EU referendum, " If " is a confident,self-assured piece of ironic mockery.

Of course the UK isn't bloody well leaving the EU.Whatever gave the 17.4 million who voted Leave that idea in the first instance?

The forces of Global Corporate capitalism and its Usury-Finance system have ineluctably triumphed over Society one more time.

The residual hope, if indeed there is any, lies in the widespread and continuing eruption of political fissures across a number of national polities such as France,Germany,Italy,Austria and increasingly eastern europe too.

At least, but as it turns out for an all too brief a historic moment,the British people raged against the dying of the light that was Britain and all it ever stood for.

fahrenheit451:235

The metropolitan ruling elites were always going to " betray " the vote to Leave? Not true!

They didn't even have the slightest inkling that the result of the 23 June 2016 Referendum on the UK's continuing membership would actually fall to the Leave side.

Nobody amongst the serried ranks of itinerant benchwarmers at Westminster nor in the byzantine bureaucracies of Whitehall actually thought it remotely conceivable that after 44 years of satrapydom,the British electorate might somehow not vote in the majority for a continuation of the status quo. And yet they did!

The same ineradicable spirit of dogged determination that got our men safely home from the beaches at Dunkirk,prevailed on another such auspicious day when confronted by the seeming inevitability of a predetermined fate,the people erred on the side of resistance.

That's how the History of our ineluctably glorious island Nation rolls.We get there;we make it;we carry on.

And now,not for the first time,what ought by the dint of inexhaustible existential endeavour to have presaged the apotheosis of triumph for the Common Man has been usurped,pimped out,squandered,bartered away for a mess of pottage by the metropolitan ruling elites.

It's a shame and a pity that our longed for liberation from the asphyxiating constraints and harrowing burdens of vassalage to the Franco-Teutonic Superstate has been denigrated,devalued,debauched and defecated upon by all our major parliamentary parties and their minor ideological cohorts.

Shall we carry on? we shall,in spite of everything,we must.

I have no time for the lost and abandoned souls of Remoaners,the 48%,the smug hubristic academics,thespians commentariat,EU-funded scientists,City financiers,shyster QC's,Uni student common room agitators-manque and all the other feckin treasonous utterly deplorable eejits who chose long before Brexit came along to live out their futile corporeal existence with a back so terribly deformed by incessant kowtowing and their egregious temerity of drawing upon our common atmosphere for their daily breaths that have singularly proven to be an extravagance courtesy of the Cosmos .

fahrenheit451:233

(The original blog was posted on February 3 2016 ,4 months prior to the Referendum.)

In any war ,you can learn more about how the struggle is actually faring by listening to what your enemies are saying amongst themselves than you ever can from what your allies are telling you.

And the remorseless struggle to bring about the dissolution and permanent downfall of the European Union is going very well indeed ; better in fact than any true enemy of this megalomanic Euro-Ruling Elites' project could possibly have dreamt of.

The renowned Historian /Commentator and all round anti-working class ,Tory Supremacist Max Hastings bemoans excellently in the DailyUsurer Mail of 3 February 2016  :-

" David Cameron today believes himself on the brink of a triumph. His proposed EU renegotiation needs only endorsement at a summit of the other 27 members. This would be followed by a June referendum, ending with an ‘in’ vote that will scupper his foes in Ukip and on the Tory Right.

But what if he is wrong? 

What if yesterday’s draft settlement, requiring merely a shifting of deckchairs in Brussels, provokes a seismic shift in the British body politic? 

Read President of the European Council Donald Tusk’s letter, which makes plain how little has changed, for instance on migrants: ‘We need to fully respect the principles of freedom of movement and non-discrimination.’

Most of what Cameron claims to have secured will remain vague aspiration, a country mile from implementation. Who else would trumpet the securing of an ‘emergency brake’ on migrants’ benefits over which he will have little control, or a red card system that requires the support of more than half of our bickering EU neighbours on any given issue?

This much is plain: the sham of a renegotiation, the pretence that the Prime Minister meant what he told us for years about his intention to change our terms of membership of the EU, has spawned a cynicism across the land that will not quickly be dispelled.

No politician dares to tell voters all the truth about difficult issues, because the message would be so bleak that they could never win an election. "

Hastings' conclusion is interesting. Life is hard then you die Max.

Works alone will not save your tawdry,backwards shitty little futile economic system and all of its petty ,soul -enslaving hierarchies

.For all true and genuine enemies and haters of the very concept and existence of this THING calling itself the European Union or any idea even remotely resembling it , it's all rather simple and straightforward. Bury it.

There's nothing to be gained ,nor does it make the necessary task any easier by concocting some entirely specious ,pseudo-philosophical / ideological ,grandiose argument over whether it gets buried in a coffin with ceremony or simply ,as it ought to be ,slung into an anonymous ditch somewhere and urinated over before the last shovelful of earth.

Can you feel the earth beginning to shake and tremble ? I'd get out now before you end up getting buried along with the rest of the legions of the doomed.

fahrenheit451:231

By 1945 ,even the most ardent Nazi fanatic  realised that the game was up.
Shortly after the War ,those leading figures who had escaped the Noose ,such as Speer claimed to have opposed Hitler's policy against the Jews and had in fact begun plotting to overthrow Hitler himself ! Yeah ,right ,whatever.
The original Nazi inspired  " dream " of a European Union , ( yes it really was theirs first ) is even now going the way of the Third Reich.
And what is clearly hastening its cataclysmic demise is the shibboleth " freedom of movement of labour. " A horrendously stupid and worthless idea let alone sentiment,but there they go getting all multiculti as if it was somehow intrinsically  " better " or more " worthy " or expressed some innate,deep positive human condition. It never did.
The make-belief " left " as much as the make-belief " right " have jointly wasted the past 70 years arguing the wrong question. And the smug ,kleptocratic Ruling Elites have profited from exploiting this divisive non-sequitur to the max. writing in the Daily Torynoncegraph  on January 24,2016  Executive Chairman of Capital Economics ,Roger Bootle sums it up thus :- ( pay attention ,this is a capitalist telling you how the real version of The Big Con functions )
But the world has changed. The manufacture and trading of goods has become a smaller part of our GDP, while tariff barriers have come down dramatically around the world. The free movement of labour is now the most important of the three freedoms – and it poses serious issues for the EU.
It has become so important because of two major factors: first, the huge expansion of the EU to the east, including countries with much lower standards of living, whose people, therefore, have a strong economic incentive to move; second, the mass of people outside the union who want to get in.
The onrush of people from outside is due to the breaking down of states in the Middle East and Africa, the increased allure of the life apparently on offer in the EU, and the inexorable rise in the populations of these regions.
Over the next few decades, the population of Africa and the Middle East is set to soar.
As a result, today’s migration issue isn’t about the allocation of resources; it isn’t even primarily about economics at all. It is about the ability and willingness of people, cultures and institutions to absorb large numbers of people from the outside, often with very different values, beliefs and traditions.
What is the answer?
Clearly although the Ruling Elites could all comfortably relocate en masse to the Cayman Islands and no-one would notice ,they aren't searching for an answer right now or ever. To all those who have never experienced it and wondered what Schadenfreude is ,well this is getting to be as good as it ever gets. I'm loving it already.

fahrenheit451:228

As the EU Withdrawal Bill grinds ineluctably on through the parliamentary process,and the actual,irrevocable date of the UK's departure from the thrall of the european union - March 29,2019 draws ever nearer, it's worth recounting some of the more egregious depredations of the aforementioned Teutonic Empire and its satrapies.

Cognoscenti of this blog will recognise the following lifted in its entirety from fahrenheit451:147 of May 4 2017.

It ought act as an antidote to the Remoaner / reluctant Leave poison being imbibed by all and sundry during this period preceding full and final exit from the clutches of the e.u.
"

The historically moribund European Union  can be viewed as a sleazy,corrupt,kleptocratic hellhole of outright fraud and embezzlement.
Amid all the venal hubristic posturing surrounding #Brexit ,once all the vacuous platitudes have been aired and philosophical points have been examined it all comes back down to money.Who pays what to whom and for what and how long for.
The current article from the euro observer is particularly instructive on this matter :-

Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, in exchange for their access to the EU single market, fund initiatives aimed at reducing social and economic disparities in poorer EU member states.

FOCUS

Hungary and Poland risk losing €1bn in Norway aid row

• 

  Girl visiting the Museum on Wheels, a mobile educational exhibition presenting the history and culture of Polish Jews. The exhibition travelled around Poland as part of an EEA grants funded project. (Photo: EEA and Norway grants)

By ALEKSANDRA ERIKSSON

OSLO, 3. MAY, 09:20

Efforts by Hungary and Poland to control funds directed to NGOs are blocking negotiations over the renewal of a €1 billion Norwegian scheme to support civil society.

The Central European governments want to take funds from organisations supporting women, gay people and the homeless, among others.

Norway has refused to give in to such demands, meaning that negotiations are stuck.

"The situation is very unclear. In the worst case, the whole support scheme could be blocked," said Vera Mora from the NGO Okotars, which administered the last Norway grant scheme in Hungary.

Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, in exchange for their access to the EU single market, fund initiatives aimed at reducing social and economic disparities in poorer EU member states.
Norway is by far the biggest donor of the so-called EEA funds, doling out some 96 percent of the money.
Poland is the largest beneficiary, followed by Romania and Hungary.
Under the next scheme, which runs until 2021, Poland stands to receive €809 million, Hungary €215 million.

 

The funds cover some shortfalls in healthcare budgets and help companies to adopt green technologies. They pay for the upkeep of cultural heritage sites and fund research projects.
Roughly 10 percent of the cash is dedicated to independent support of civic society, a mandatory part of programme.
In Poland, the Law and Justice (PiS) government has formally announced that it would like the money to be channelled through a government body - although they have yet to establish the body.

And that is outrageous! especially given that a strand of contentious opinion on #Brexit recommends that the UK go the EEA route to maintaining Single market access once we have actually exited the EU !!
As a rule of thumb, the further east and south you go across the continent of europe the greater the incidence of systemic corruption within EU member states.

The scale of it beggars rational belief.It makes the Danegeld tribute paid by 10th.Century  English Kings to keep the foreign invaders quiet seem like spare pocket change.

Brexit needs to be done asap, no further negotiations whatsoever, no compromise transitional EEA membership.