The Brexit thread

[tapitsbo]

Perhaps what is meant is that their skin is isolated from the many failures of the system that they serve.

[American Dream]

Brexit: the Monkey's Paw edition posted by Richard Seymour

This is the Brexit that none of those who supported it, rallied for it, campaigned for it, voted for it, really wanted.

I am not here referring to the so-called 'Bregrets' (please stop this) expressed by about 7% of those who voted to Leave. Those regrets are clearly not enough to get people to support a new referendum, which is very strongly opposed in polls. (Also, please don't try to get around this difficulty by talking about how 'we are a parliamentary sovereignty' for god's sake.) I am talking about the fact that the number one issue, by far, among Leave voters, was the fear of immigration. It was the question of the free movement of labour within the European Union that harnessed the energies of the Leave.

It was, you will recall, a question of quality not just quantity. All those Romanians. All those Bulgarians. All those Poles. All those Turks looming over the horizon. NHS under threat. 'Breaking point'. Not that most of those who voted Leave had much experience of migration - the areas with the highest numbers of EU nationals living in them were also those with the strongest Remain votes. But that is how it usually works with race politics in the UK.

And yet, strange to relate, it now appears that the majority of British voters want EU nationals to stay. Leading Brexiters like Douglas Carswell have now openly campaigned for their rights to stay on. And even Nigel Farage has joined those condemning Theresa May for refusing to guarantee the rights of EU nationals in the UK to stay here.

Continues at: http://www.leninology.co.uk/2016/07/bre ... ition.html

[coffin_dodger]

Bank of England warns Brexit risks beginning to crystallise BBC News 05 July 2016

The Bank of England has warned there is evidence that risks it identified related to Brexit are emerging.

In a major report it states: "There is evidence that some risks have begun to crystallise. The current outlook for UK financial stability is challenging."

cont - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-36712040

[coffin_dodger]

I have the distinct feeling that the UK is currently experiencing something akin to The Phoney War - the period between the declaration of war in Sept '39 and when the actual fighting bagan in Apr '40. There is an eerie calm, considering the potential ramifications of brexit. I'm enjoying it whilst it lasts. Cheers!

[Searcher08]

I have the distinct feeling that the UK is currently experiencing something akin to The Phoney War - the period between the declaration of war in Sept '39 and when the actual fighting bagan in Apr '40. There is an eerie calm, considering the potential ramifications of brexit. I'm enjoying it whilst it lasts. Cheers!

I was visiting today with my best mate and we both were thinking something very similar - this really feels like 'the very end of the Thirties'. British soldiers are being deployed to Poland; the Russians are putting their Syrian proved Area Denial missile system into Kaliningrad and China sez "We ownez teh Paracels", USSA sez "Nope!"

[slimmouse]

Im just wondering how many people in England know exactly who "The Bank of England ", who say this that and the other actually are? - and what they and their buddies up there are doing to the rest of us ?

Once enough people know this, we have a platform.

Edited to add in the light of searchers post, I reckon that these people know that many of we know.

[Searcher08]

Im just wondering how many people in England know exactly who "The Bank of England ", who say this that and the other actually are? - and what they and their buddies up there are doing to the rest of us ?

Once enough people know this, we have a platform.

Edited to add in the light of searchers post, I reckon that these people know that many of we know.

I reckon they do AND they dont care - AT ALL.
They are too busy playing their games. This was apparently caught 'off camera'. I found it very funny.

[slimmouse]

I find Kenneth Clarke to be the epitome of the lunacy that we allow ourselves to be governed by

[American Dream]

More than 500 reports of hate crimes were made to police in London after Britain’s vote to leave the European Union.

The Metropolitan police said they received 599 allegations between Friday 24 June, the day the result was revealed, and Saturday 2 July.

Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Met commissioner, said that the vote had allegedly been “directly referenced or alluded to” in 23 incidents.

The force said it had received eight allegations that Polish or other European communities had been targeted.

The Met, which is Britain’s largest force, usually averages between 20 and 50 reports of hate crime a day. On Sunday 26 June it received 62 reports and the following Tuesday it had 64.

The figures were revealed in a letter from Hogan-Howe to Keith Vaz, the chair of the home affairs committee, which on Tuesday announced an investigation into hate crime.

Suspected incidents in London have included the spraying of racist graffiti on the front entrance of the Polish Social and Cultural Association (POSK) in Hammersmith on 26 June.

On Monday, police released CCTV footage of a man throwing rotten pork meat at a mosque in north London.

Nationally, police say the aftermath of the referendum produced a fivefold increase in reports to a special hate crime reporting website, with 331 received by last Wednesday.

Most incidents involved alleged harassment, but Avon and Somerset police said a Polish man suffered “significant injuries” following a racially aggravated assault by two men on the day the result was announced.

The victim, in his 30s, was walking along St Michael’s Avenue in Yeovil, Somerset at about 6pm on 24 June when two men approached him and asked whether he spoke English, before repeatedly punching and kicking him, police said.

He required hospital treatment for a potentially life-changing eye injury, a fractured cheekbone and substantial bruising to his body.

Other incidents included the distribution of cards saying “Leave the EU/No more Polish vermin” in English and Polish outside a school in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire.

An official report published last year said there were an estimated 222,000 hate crimes on average per year in England and Wales. The most commonly reported motivating factor was race. Police estimate that only one in four hate crimes are reported to them.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/201 ... rexit-vote

[Searcher08]

I find Kenneth Clarke to be the epitome of the lunacy that we allow ourselves to be governed by

Douglas Adams > Quotes > Quotable Quote

“It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."
"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"
"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said Ford. "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"
"What?"
"I said," said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, "have you got any gin?"
"I'll look. Tell me about the lizards."
Ford shrugged again.
"Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them," he said. "They're completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone's got to say it."
"But that's terrible," said Arthur.
"Listen, bud," said Ford, "if I had one Altairian dollar for every time I heard one bit of the Universe look at another bit of the Universe and say 'That's terrible' I wouldn't be sitting here like a lemon looking for a gin.”

― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

[seemslikeadream]

Moon of Alabama

Baghdad, Brexit And The Chicken Coup

A few issues I meant to write about (but from which family issues keep me away):

Last night two bombs by Islamic State terrorists killed 172 and wounded some 200 people in Baghdad. At the same time the New York Times had a piece up, with zero evidence for its thesis, which was headlined Appealing to Its Base, ISIS Tempers Its Violence in Muslim Countries. (The headline was since changed.) The people in Turkey, Bangladesh, Yemen, Iraq and Syria - all place where IS committed mass murder last week, likely have a different view than the NYT expressed.

Will there be a Je Suis Baghdad campaign tonight? Will the colors of the Iraqi flag be projected onto the Eiffel Tower, the Berlin Gate or the White House? No? Why not? Are the mostly Shia kids, women and men killed in Baghdad the wrong kind of people?

I strongly agree with this paragraph: Brexit Is Just The First Earthquake Of Its Kind

People want a new order in which a sense of belonging and a sense of security, nationalism and economics, go together. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this democratic desire. At base, this is what this vote is about. The British people are of course not alone in this search. In searching for a vision in which nations can be economically strong in a connected world, some opportunists will pair up with genuinely racist elements to make political capital. But to see this as merely the resurgence of some archaic, parochial, provincial populism is to miss the wood for the trees.
The Canary has an excellent series on the long planned but failed Chicken Coup in the British Labour party.Tony Blair’s crony elite want to snatch Labour back from the working class, How a PR company manufactured the Labour coup – Part I, Senior Labour Party insider reveals plan to oust Corbyn was in play 10 months ago (EXCLUSIVE). The coup was publicly announced in The Telegraph ten days before it happened: Labour rebels hope to topple Jeremy Corbyn in 24-hour blitz after EU referendum. This coup attempt was an embarrassment. The Blairite masters of spin have obviously lost their abilities.

[American Dream]

Post Brexit, my lexit friends keep telling me that the result represents ‘huge opportunities for the left’. The ruling class is in crisis and antagonisms are being sharpened. My answer to these people is always, ‘what Left’? Where is it, what social forces does it have that can take advantage of this crisis?

The Right are always in a better position to take advantage of a crisis, and Brexit is no exception. For decades now the Left has been picking fights it can’t win, getting beaten up, and then starting another fight. Without forces, you can’t fight, and if you can’t fight, you can’t win.

What the Left should be doing, then, is building up its social forces that would be able to wage a protracted fight against Capital and the State. A perspective for theorising the creation of these forces is the concept of hegemony; the notion that one can tie a seemingly disparate set of interests to a particular class project through a discourse articulated with our experiences. Hegemony shouldn’t just be understood as a clever language game. Instead, it is a fundamental material thing, rooted in our everyday practices: in our workplaces, homes, pubs, state institutions, sexual relations; hegemony is founded in the dull compulsion of everyday life. It is at the level of the everyday that the neoliberals win consent for their class project. Everyday competition and discipline build consenting neoliberal subjects. Neoliberalism is part of everyday life, neoliberalism is the common sense through which we see the world.

It seems to me what the Left needs to do is build up its own, socialist hegemony. We need to build up our own hegemony rooted in people’s everyday experiences and articulated with a ‘socialist common sense’. What does this mean in practice? To me, it means building up a set of solid material institutions which provide a base from which to wage struggles against Capital and the State and simultaneously form the basis of a new society. An infrastructure that can provide shelter and respite from the vagaries of the market and reproduce individuals as ‘socialists’.

These should include unions and anti-fascist organisations, but also social centres, football clubs, ‘red gyms’, cultural events, and a weatherspoons of the Left; a people’s palace fit for the 21st Century. Places where people can go to act politically but also enjoy themselves, places where people are reproduced as socialists, where the primary logic of the space is not competition and accumulation but solidarity and friendship. For this project to be truly hegemonic, it needs to be expansive and outward looking, always trying to draw people in and never becoming insular and cliquish, as much of the left often does. If basic bonds of solidarity are rebuilt, if communism becomes part of everyday life, we can then start to build up consent and the ability to force through a communist class project.

These aren’t utopian demands, but are embedded in the reality that surrounds us. From football clubs like Clapton, FC Manchester, and Whitehawk to social centres like Common House and The Cowely Club, to national co-op projects like Radical Routes; the basic infrastructure and models of how to build it are already there. We just need to generalise these projects and deepen those that already exist.

A left wing hegemony needs to be rooted in the dull compulsion of everyday life, it needs to start at the level of the mundane, everyday communism. It begins with creating our own way of life outside of and not reliant on Capital or the State.

http://www.weareplanc.org/blog/for-a-sp ... -the-left/

[Heaven Swan]

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2016/07/i-m-disappointed-about-brexit-snobbery-some-pro-eu-protesters-hard-take

New Statesman: I’m disappointed about Brexit – but the snobbery of some pro-EU protesters is hard to take

July 6, 2016. GLOSSWITCH

Of all the brilliantly scathing lyrics on Pulp’s 1995 classic Different Class, my favourite has to be this line from I Spy: “Take your Year in Provence and shove it up your ass.” Even if you’ve not read your Peter Mayle, you know exactly who the target is: a self-satisfied middle class who’ve mistaken educational privilege for intellectual and moral exceptionality, and are to be found using cultural tokens – the cottage in France, the wine from Tuscany, the opera tickets for Bayreuth – to state and restate their presumed superiority over the common masses.

I couldn’t get this lyric out of my head when looking at images of last Saturday’s anti-Brexit March for Europe in London. I didn’t want to think of it. I’m an out-and-out pro-Remain Europhile. I studied languages at university, completed a PhD in German literature and have worked in modern language publishing for the past 12 years. My relationship with European culture is not a casual one – it is committed and passionate. Yet there’s something about that march, and about pro-Remain discourse in general, that is making me uneasy.

For instance , this is how Spiked’s Tom Slater wrote up what he called the “march against the masses”:

For all the Remain camp fearmongering about post-Brexit xenophobia, its own fear and loathing of the Leave-voting masses was on full show.[…] Anyone who believes in democracy, whether Remainer or Leaver, should be appalled by the bald, elitist sentiments now being expressed.

I don’t agree with Slater’s position. I think it’s laughable to see those who have pushed the Leave message hardest as anything other than an elite. But ultimately they’re not the ones who voted to leave the EU. I don’t think those who marched were expressing fear and loathing – indeed, I wanted to be among them – but we should be concerned by how easy it is to demolish a complex argument with accusations of snobbery.

There’s a particular kind of snobbery associated with a love of “old” European culture. It’s the kind that allows Nigel Farage to stand there in his Union Jack shoes, not caring one jot about your long-term welfare, and say: “Look at the Europhiles over there! See, they’re laughing at you! I wouldn’t stand for that.”

You can say it’s nonsense, but it’s an argument works. And besides, just how nonsensical is it? There’s a difference between cultural elitism and favouring a politics that serves to prop up a social and economic elite. Unfortunately, it can be the former that has the most immediacy and provokes the biggest reaction.

My own background is not particularly Year in Provence. It is solidly middle-class, but my parents had risen up the social ladder. Europhilia struck them as pretentious and showy, the province of pseuds who were eager to catch you out. My dad would get in there first by boasting about having got 2 per cent in his French O-level and making jokes about “who won the war”. It’s a defensiveness that can be easily dismissed as xenophobia, but it is not without some justification.

Had I been in London, I would have attended the march. Apart from anything else, the referendum result makes me feel embarrassed in front of the rest of Europe, and mightily pissed off that having devoted all of my adult working life to European languages and literature, I’m going to get tarred with the same “insular Brit” brush.

“Not in my name!” I want to yell, as though it is all about me. “I’m not like that lot over there!” But is this because I am more open-minded, or rather because I feel more affinity with middle-class French and Germans than with working-class Brits?

Whenever a British person talks of how insular “we” all are, you can guarantee that they’re not really including themselves. The differences between countries can be superficial compared to those within them. Indeed, how we respond to the former often illustrates the latter. For instance, ever since 2004, when the study of languages ceased to be compulsory at Key Stage 4, uptake of French and particularly German has fallen significantly.

Meanwhile the profile of those gaining MFL qualifications has become increasingly privileged, concentrated in private schools and grammars. European culture is not equally accessible to all. You can’t shame people into loving their neighbours once they’ve witnessed so many doors being slammed in their faces.

The Remain campaign was always naturally on the back foot. There’s nothing sexy about advocating that things stay as they are, especially not when people are struggling. The Leave campaign told lies and appealed to racism, yes. But for many I think it also provoked a deeper emotional rebellion. Take your Year in Provence and shove it up your ass! Whatever the practicalities of our deeply entwined relationship with the EU, it may be that only a lucky few have ever really felt the love.

[American Dream]

Nigel Farage (UKIP Party Political Rant)


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEpDcjSw1B4

[slimmouse]

FWIW, my own 2 cents.

Having spent the best part of the last 15 years looking at this, as a supposedly educated guy, I can fully understand those who fear the xenophobic backlash implications of brexit.

I would be a liar if I was to say that to some extent Xenophobia is not the cause.

But surely ( AD ) I would also be a liar if i suggested that this has nothing to do with deeper concerns about our own individual sovereignty, which I feel is a message that is increasingly being understood.

After all, the people that have brought you the EU are the same people who have no qualms about bombing the shit out of innocents in the name of democracy, whilst at the same time telling you that a plant is illegal. I mean, would you vote for that ?

Yes, theyre one and the same select bunch of lunatics.


in the age of information how many people can continue to buy that kind of BS?


Yet at the moment, these people rule our roost. Just as they, or at least their memes have done for best part of 5000 years or so.