BF2S Forums Where are all the whiny peaceful "Enlightened" European now?

it’s funny how everything i said is eventuating to be true, isn’t it? no deal has been blocked because it literally isn’t what the majority of people voted for in the referendum. the tiny far-right ideological minority who tried to hijack proceedings (who you have no problem lambasting as ‘oxford toffs’, when it suits you and doesn’t contradict your own brexit sympathies too much) have been shut down — and rightfully so, as they try to push an undemocratic, hardline brexit on the rest of us.

21 tory’s, including some who have until recently been senior cabinet ministers, and others who have been dyed-in-the-wool deep blue conservatives for 30 years (including winston churchill’s grandson, natch) have had the whip taken from them and been banished from their own party. why? because they rebelled against johnson in the EXACT same spirit as i outlined above: the referendum was for brexit, but not for a catastrophic no deal one. what were you huffing and puffing about for the last two pages, again? whiny remainers trying to ignore ‘the people’? seems now that the majority of the house of parliament, including those who have been pro-brexit and voting for it all along, are acting like ‘whiny remainers’. oh dear!

the current PM and his cabinet are a joke. they consistently voted to frustrate proceedings over the last two years, scuppering any deals and blocking parliamentary process. as soon as they grab the wheel, they threaten to call elections or kick their own party members out for not supporting them — when they’ve been the rebels for two years! the disingenuousness of it is staggering. johnson, a man who drove around the country with ‘let’s give £350 million a week back to our NHS’ stickered on a bus, is now insisting we drive off a cliff into a hugely damaging no deal scenario. (it’s funny how these hardliners, who seem perverse in the face of continual warnings and economic forecasts, like rees-mogg above, are all investors with sizeable financial portfolios— wonder how much farage and his hedge fund pals are making off the devaluation of the pound? it’s profitable, acting in the interests of ‘the people’!)

you keep saying that people like myself need to ‘get over it’ and accept democracy. accepting democracy doesn’t mean consenting to other’s opposing views: it means consenting to proper democratic process and understanding that it doesn’t always give you what you, personally, want. baying mobs don’t get instant leverage of power, and politicians don’t get to instantly enact things because of ‘the people’. a process has to be followed, and the current cabinet, with its talk of ‘ignoring any bills that are passed’ and proroguing parliament so that MPs have no time to schedule motions, is trying to get around the proper legislative and legal processes of the country, because they know that their no deal policy does not have the support of the majority of the house, and by proxy then that of the country’s. that’s an incredibly dishonest and dangerous game. people who complain about it are not complaining because they’re butt hurt over losing the referendum. if you can’t see the difference then you are quite stupid.



you know something has gone potty when ken clarke, the father of the house and a true conservative politician for FIFTY years, is saying this.

Last edited by uziq (2019-09-05 01:44:42)

the excesses of the european project? to what are you referring, exactly? i grew up on the border of south wales, and the corridor between cardiff and newport was a huge beneficiary of EU money. they rebuilt the entire road network around that area! wales received £2.2 billion of european structural funds since 2012. what excesses and legal impositions are you talking about, when your 'welsh uncles' grumble? to say nothing of the frankly protectionist EU policies for welsh farmers, keeping them market competitive and afloat:

Common agricultural policy: A £200m a year scheme providing payments to more than 16,000 farms in Wales "to help protect and enhance the countryside". One pillar of this is the Welsh Government Rural Communities rural development programme, a £957m programme running from 2014-20 supporting businesses and farms in rural areas.

bloody meddling europeans! so yes, i do consider the decision of the welsh, who are a huge net drain on the UK and EU economy, as somewhat foolish to bite the hand that feeds them.

there's a word for your style of posting when you start up with the auto-generative tabloid talk about 'european excesses' and 'people have had enough': cant.

A new report released today (Tuesday 24 May 2016) shows that Wales receives £245 million more from the European Union than it pays in. The overall net benefit to Wales was around £79 per head in 2014.

The briefing paper finds that the amount of money Wales received from the EU budget in 2014 totalled £658m, while Wales’ contribution to the EU (after accounting for a share of the UK’s rebate) stood at £414m. This net benefit of £245m was equal to around 0.4% of GDP in 2014.

https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/news/view/327 … 9-per-head

there certainly won't be any welsh lamb on the table anymore when all those farmers are down at the job centre looking for new work!

Last edited by uziq (2019-09-05 04:10:28)

by 'other issues' i assume you mean, in your coded and dog whistling way, which seems to be your normal mode, that they're affronted by the three polish families that moved into the rhondda valley between 1994 and 2014. never mind that cardiff, swansea, newport, etc all have huge immigrant populations from ... the commonwealth, india/pakistan, etc, that has absolutely nothing to do with europe. bloody foreigners! cries the swarthy welshman whose italian grandparents emigrated from italy in 1920 to find work.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-36616028
EU referendum: The result in maps and charts

wales: 52.5% leave, 47.5% remain. hardly a 'collective decision' to quit the EU, was it?

here's a quaint story from 2016, with your poster boy, nigel farage of the brexit party:
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/n … um-7985017

Nigel Farage warns today he would fight for a second referendum on Britain in Europe if the remain campaign won by a narrow margin next month.

The Ukip leader said a small defeat for his leave camp would be “unfinished business” and predicted pressure would grow for a re-run of the 23 June ballot.

Farage told the Mirror: “In a 52-48 referendum this would be unfinished business by a long way. If the remain campaign win two-thirds to one-third that ends it.”

whoops!!!!

Last edited by uziq (2019-09-05 04:23:44)

scotland voted overwhelmingly to remain, in one of the few cut-and-dry results of any region (farage's fabled 'two-thirds majority').

so i can quite understand why they are angry that a tory party pandering to english nationalists in the home counties and kent and medway region are steering brexit towards a no-deal crashing out. they have absolutely no representation at westminster at all in the brexit negotiations, despite having 35 scottish nationalist party MPs in the house. a very legitimate complaint that rather undermines the decades-long rhetoric of devolution and delegation that we've been placating scotland, wales and northern ireland with.

this all sounds like quite a reasonable worry about representation, to me.

there’s been very little appetite for a further referendum on scottish independence, which has of course now changed, yes. what a great calamity of modern governance that is.

scottish nationalists are entitled to bang on about independence if that’s their bugbear, just as the monster raving loony party can keep campaigning wearing suits of armour and talking about milk and honey, for all they like. doesn’t mean there’s been electoral support for it. the most successful politician in scotland in the last decade, ruth davidson, a pro-unionist conservative, just resigned — over boris johnson and the current government’s mismanagement of the issues. whooops!

and i’m sorry to hear about your racist uncles. they must be having a hell of a time of the 21st century. still, i doubt carmarthen is quite so bad, and they’ll be alright grumbling down the pub. half of their compatriots evidently don’t share the appetite for self-immolation because there’s a polish mart on the high street.

i’m very happy to see the old codgers go up against the youth vote now, in a second referendum or general election. a million youth voters just registered in the last week. i wonder if they’re nervous around romanians?

Last edited by uziq (2019-09-05 04:38:20)

may’s negotiation strategy was a disaster, yes (though it was a disaster precisely because she failed to reach across the benches to involve both sides of the debate in her strategy — an approach which you otherwise dismiss)...

cameron’s gamble was a disaster. one of the biggest self-woundings in the history of politics.

johnson’s sheer opportunism, in this as in all things, is proving to be a disaster. the man’s only way to get the job he’s obsessed over all his life was to court the UKIP faction, and now he’s beholden to them in a death spiral.  the man doesn’t stand for anything and never has. like may, he was telling conferences of business leaders in the months leading up to the referendum that remain was the sane choice.

also how are you calling ken clarke a ‘moron’ because he’s a europhile? most mainstream tory politicians are europhiles! fucking margaret thatcher was a europhile! should she have been a closet lib dem? it’s only very recently that the crank far-right with their european obsession have been given any credence. where was the working man’s indignation over europe 10 years ago? where was this great suffering mass of people who were angry at europe in 2004? it’s remarkable how fast it has come to be the defining point of so many people’s lives, isn’t it? don’t slur the details.



another europhile lib-dem turncoat, dilbert?

Last edited by uziq (2019-09-05 06:27:07)

https://soundcloud.com/limmy/brexitday

Maybe Blair set the precedent for the UK with the Iraq war - I'll ignore the facts, the law and public opinion - I'm going to use any means to get what I want done.
At least the Brexiteers have public opinion on their side.

Blair was anything but Labour, Johnson is anything but Conservative.

Someone said recently that normal politics is over, all we will have in the future is different groups screaming at each other, mostly single-issue fanatics, and the world will burn.

Once again you miss the point, could be early onset dementia?

Blair set the precedent in acting like an all powerful President, ramming through his nutty agenda through lies and manipulation of the people and parliament.

precisely macbeth. he’s like the equivalent of someone who keeps talking about the crimes of the bush administration in discussions about obamacare or trump’s wall or whatever.

so it’s blair’s fault that johnson/cummings are trying to undermine parliament? and not because, you know, cummings is an ideologue who sees parliament as an institution to be undermined. no, it was blair!

the precedent of what? the british parliament approved the invasion of iraq. what are you actually prattling on about? blair didn’t undermine any democratic process: he said he’d resign (with most of his cabinet) if they lost the vote. the diametric opposite of the tack the johnson lot are taking (threatening resignation and never intending to go through with it, while ignoring due process).

a wonderfully excoriating piece here on one of the architects of the leave campaign and brexit, michael gove. human flotsam.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n17/richard-j … nted-dalek

note this part from the article dilbert. what was that i was saying ALL ALONG about the referendum and brexit campaign never being about a no-deal total exit? seems even the guy who devised and ran the campaign (once) agreed with me...

Gove, like Johnson, has never worried about inconsistency. In March, for example, he declared firmly: ‘We didn’t vote to leave without a deal. That wasn’t the message of the campaign I helped lead.’ During the Brexit campaign he attracted a good deal of ridicule for telling a TV interviewer who cited the gloomy view taken by economists of Britain’s prospects outside the EU: ‘I think the people in this country have had enough of experts … from organisations with acronyms saying they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.’ A decade earlier, in a Commons debate in May 2007, he had said: ‘Let us listen to the experts.’ He seems to approach every subject with the mentality of an Oxford Union debater: no matter what you’ve said before, the main thing is to trounce whoever happens to be in front of you at the time.

funny how everything i’ve observed and predicted in this thread is basically correct. meanwhile you’re still going on about new labour, iraq and jews. k

Last edited by uziq (2019-09-11 04:30:03)

how did he ignore the law? it was given full approval by parliament according to the democratic process of declaring war. it wasn’t illegal at the time. that new knowledge has come to light is besides the point, he didn’t undermine democratic process. johnson and co. are intentionally trying to foreclose democracy. if you can’t see the difference then i’m afraid your ‘i left the UK in 1997’ obsessions are showing a little too clearly.

you claimed he set the precedent for going around like a president and exercising total executive control. that is absolutely false and wrong. you can drop the lousy equivalence. politicians never necessarily act according to ‘public opinion’ (public opinion once upon a time supported the likes of enoch powell, need i add).

These are the men in charge of taking Britain out of the EU. Johnson’s government, purged of any politician who has expressed the slightest doubt about the wisdom of leaving, with or without a deal, is focused single-mindedly on leaving by 31 October come what may. Only by doing so, the ruling triumvirate of Johnson, Gove and Cummings seem to believe, can the Conservatives win back the votes they have lost to Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party and triumph in a subsequent general election. Promises of new funding for the police, support for the NHS, a fresh crackdown on immigration, tougher discipline in schools, and departure from EU institutions before the projected leaving date, have all been made with the same purpose in mind. Johnson is making a show of negotiating a new deal with the EU, but it’s no more than a show; he must know he’s not going to get one. No deal is looking increasingly likely, and a divided opposition doesn’t seem capable of stopping it. Given the continuing stalemate on the issue in the House of Commons, the government is now trying to achieve a no deal Brexit without its approval, suspending Parliament for five weeks, a period unprecedented in length since 1945. For the ruling triumvirate, the consequences for the country don’t seem to matter, though they know they will be disastrous in the short term and probably in the medium to long term too.

It isn’t just that they don’t care. Gove and Cummings were from the very outset a disruptive force in government. During one major row with Clegg while Gove was education secretary, the deputy prime minister and his team showed they could give as good as they got: ‘The DfE advisors,’ they asserted, ‘are lying, going rogue, being hostile and talking bollocks.’ Attempting to smooth things over, Cameron told Clegg: ‘The thing that you’ve got to remember with Michael is that he’s basically a bit of a Maoist – he believes that the world makes progress through a process of creative destruction.’ But a lot of it wasn’t creative at all. When I asked Cummings what working for Gove was like, he told me that he had to spend most of his time firefighting, putting out the conflagrations his boss caused in one policy area after another. Who will have to do this job in the aftermath of a no deal Brexit is anybody’s guess but, whoever they are, they’ll be busy.

frightening stuff.

all that may be so, and you know i don't disagree with you one bit about blair being bush's bitch, acting in the back pocket of neo-conservative, war-hawk interests, etc. but it went through parliament with the information that was on the table at the time and was legally approved. you didn't have scenes of MPs diving onto the speaker's chair, arguing about being silenced, in emulation of protesting the monarch's despotism in the 17th century, like this:





neither did you have the judiciary in the UK passing explicit rulings that his behaviour was illegal, like this today, where the scottish high court has ruled the prorogation as illegal (admittedly their constitutional law is slightly different from english/welsh law, but still).

that blair might be liable for war crimes does not do anything so much to undermine the processes of the UK parliament as johnson and his lot willingly misusing the queen's speech, ending of parliamentary sessions, prorogation, etc. for their own political ends.