Archive for February, 2019
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Friday, February 15th, 2019Opinion Polls: A Warning To Labour
Wednesday, February 13th, 2019It is my personal experience that in my lifetime our country has never been so badly governed, nor has it been subjected to such a grossly dysfunctional economic model which continually makes the rich richer and the poor poorer. Aside from Brexit chaos, transport muddle, Universal Credit failure and unreasonable pressure on all public services from increasing demand and reducing resources, we were treated to our immature Defence Secretary announcing the deployment of our giant carrier to the South China Sea so as to confront China, with other measures to needle Russia. This is not only militarily illiterate given the actual state of our forces, but adventurist posturing for which the minister has no money. He is part of a government whose policies have lead to well over a million people relying on food banks.
Yet it beggars belief that the latest in depth poll shows that the government would win a snap election. Of course the poll could well be wrong. At the last election polls, all of them, predicted a landslide for May when she suddenly went to the country and we all recall the shock on election night. Yet even the appearance of the poll, when Labour should be far ahead, is a stark warning to the Labour leadership to sharpen up its act. It cannot please everybody across the country, nor even in the Labour party itself, so it must stop trying. At the moment its stance on Brexit, nuanced, clever and cerebral to the pros, is an indecipherable muddle to ordinary people. That is blocking out its very popular policies on public services, utilities, ending austerity, sorting out the railways and no end of other positive ideas to reboot the country, currently suffocating under decaying carcass of what was once known as Thatcherism.
As for Brexit. It is a mess. Nobody voted for it. What they were offered was stay or leave. Leave was easy like cancelling Amazon prime. Well it’s not. It is a massive legal disentanglement, with unknown economic consequences, with the greatest curb on personal freedom and personal sovereignty, at the moment I am a citizen of the EU with full voting rights for its parliament, in our history. There will be no Brexit dividend whatever shape it takes.
The majority both of Labour members and Labour voters want to stay in the EU. The right and democratic thing is to go for a People’s Vote. It is clear cut, simple and in full accord with Labour’s heritage of championing the rights of ordinary people and the universal nature of democracy. It is also, with the present factinalised and divided political class and the polarised country, the only course that makes any sense. The Labour leadership are going for a general election. There are two problems with this.
First it will not resolve the big historic issue of the hour and second Labour might well lose it. A People’s Vote will end Brexit once and for all. The Tory government will fall. And Corbyn will coast into Downing Street.
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Monday, February 11th, 2019Grayling: Should He Go?
Monday, February 11th, 2019Usually when everybody calls for a minister to go, there is a backdrop of scandal or misjudgement over a particular issue. With Chris Grayling it is not one thing but many; an accumulation of disaster and detachment in two Departments, Justice and Transport. In each problems, unresolved, pile up under Grayling’s leadership. So in a proper government in normal times he would have to be shuffled out.
But we are not in normal times. The government is weaker, more divided and more unable to find its way than any British government in modern history. Changing a hapless minister will make little difference. The problem, as everyone can see, is the government itself and sooner or later it, all of it, has to go.
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Saturday, February 9th, 2019Free Kindle Download or Read Free with Amazon Prime.
Set in the mid nineteen nineties, this fast moving thriller lifts the curtain on sex, sleaze and corruption in high places as the long reign of the government totters to an end, following the ousting of the iconic Margaret Thatcher. Downfall catches the mood of those times with a host of fictional characters who engage in political intrigue, sex, money laundering and murder, pursued by an Irish investigative journalist and his girlfriend, the daughter of a cabinet minister found dead in a hotel room after bondage sex.
The Brexiteers’ Trade Deal Uplands? What Trade Deals?
Saturday, February 9th, 2019Among all the wishful thinking, pipe dreams, ignorance and lies which form the manifesto of the hard Brexiteers, ‘freedom to do trade deals with other countries’ is by far their most often proclaimed. The United Kingdom already has trading arrangements outside the EU with more countries than at any time in its modern history. Leaving the EU without a deal would void all of them. It now transpires that the promised ease with which we would instantly get roll over deals to enable that trade to continue were based on almost total ignorance of the legal and political framework of these treaties, and the rhetoric was tripe. No such roll overs have been secured and Japan, with whom we are supposed to be especially matey, is driving for a much harder bargain than it has given to the EU. Which is less favourable to us.
It is no small wonder that the word fiasco is being widely used in Europe to describe the Brexit nightmare.
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Friday, February 8th, 2019Brexit: Labour Steps Up To the Plate
Friday, February 8th, 2019The Brexit drama is hotting up and reaching a moment when something will happen which will change the nature and identity as well as the future prospects of the United Kingdom. But nobody knows what or how. The EU is now describing the situation in our country as a fiasco. This blog agrees.
To reiterate for new readers, I am a Remainer who believes passionately in the EU as the greatest political achievement since the fall of the Roman Empire. I see myself as first European, then British and finally English. I value my European citizenship above all others. I see the European Union as a project for peace, built on national integration, open borders and trade. The political union is the core, the economic union is the structure within which all can together prosper and within which individuals can enjoy personal freedom and shared sovereignty without equal in history. I regard nationalism as racism in another form; it is bad, dangerous and even, yes, evil. So now you know.
But the crisis now engulfing our country goes beyond all this. We are engaged in a nightmare sequel of national self harm, of which we are ourselves the authors. We are already damaged but if we do not act now to stave of the lunacy of a crash Brexit, an unhappy misfortune will become a frightening catastrophe. So we have to unite around a course of action which puts the jobs, welfare, livelihood, health and wellbeing of ordinary people at its heart and preserves the integrity of the United Kingdom, itself now in danger of busting apart.
So Labour has come forward with proposals which the EU cautiously acknowledges could form the basis of a sensible way forward, acceptable to the majority in the Commons as well as the EU.
But it will never satisfy the so called European Research Group made up of Tory nationalists of the very worst kind, neither will it please the DUP. These two minority political groupings, not the EU, are the intransigent problem in our midst and it is against them that action must now be taken to isolate them in the minority corner which they actually occupy. A cross party consensus in the Commons will do that very well.
Labour has made an historic move in the right direction. May must now reach out and find a viable accord which parliament will back. This is very much not a moment to run away barefoot into a cornfield.
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Thursday, February 7th, 2019Corbyn’s Labour: High Water Mark?
Wednesday, February 6th, 2019Nobody ever imagined Corbyn would become leader of the Labour Party. Nor that he would survive in that job. Nor that he would turn the tide on May in 2017 and push Labour to over 12 million votes for the first time since 1997. Nor that he would make Labour the biggest party in Europe. But he did. Yet now there are some signs that Labour is slipping both in the polls and in the total of its membership. So has the tide of the Left reached as far as it will go?
There is no doubt that Corbyn has changed the political conversation, moved the centre several steps to the left and brought into political engagement millions of young people. That gives Labour a massive foundation on which to build. The problem for Labour is Brexit, but not in the ideological sense of the Tories. Seventy per cent of Labour party members voted to stay in the EU and as many as eighty percent are thought willing to come out and vote Remain in a new referendum, which the majority of them want.
But large numbers of the seats Labour holds voted Leave. Many of these are marginal. So Corbyn and his senior team have been ambiguous much of the time on what their Brexit policy actually is. If you listen carefully you can grasp the main threads, but only if you are an enthusiast for nuance and detail. To everyone else the party seems, while not riven in shreds like the Tories, indecisive and muddled and Corbyn’s leadership is beginning to look weak. If you add the ongoing rumbling about antisemitism, you have a dangerous build up of a not good something.
The Labour leadership is not in trouble, but it could be if it does not come down off various fences and stand somewhere on firm ground, where people can see and understand. Not all will like it. But that is politics. And that is how Corbyn was chosen in the first place.