Brexit

[David]

8 minutes ago, Ronnie said:

I didn't say "Brits are X". I spoke about "a proportion". 2) I didn't say "everyone else is Y". I said I wasn't aware of this characteristic of a proportion of Brits being a feature elsewhere. I'm happy to have been corrected but would've preferred you do so without the misrepresentation that I engaged in "that kind of stereotyping".

Yeah, I'd kind of moved onto the wider point by this stage, and wasn't referring to you in particular. Apologies if it seemed that way.

 

[BomberPat]

I think what's fundamentally different about anti-EU movements in the UK compared to the rest of the Europe - in my admittedly limited experience - is, aside from the physical disconnect from mainland Europe, that in the UK anti-EU sentiment has always had the tacit approval of the "establishment". 

For as long as we've been members of the EU, we've been fed with bullshit headlines about bendy bananas, banning prawn cocktail crisps, and encyclopedia length regulations on how to sell lettuce. The only way the EU has ever entered the popular imagination is as a vague assemblance of busybodies and interfering jobsworths. That perception has had the tacit approval of the body politic, because there has never been an ounce of political will to represent the EU otherwise, or to really publicly acknowledge their role in British politics or British civic or cultural life at all.

In most other European countries, it seems that anti-EU movements tend to be more on the fringe or, at the very least, more overtly political in nature. 

[David]

1 minute ago, BomberPat said:

I think what's fundamentally different about anti-EU movements in the UK compared to the rest of the Europe - in my admittedly limited experience - is, aside from the physical disconnect from mainland Europe, that in the UK anti-EU sentiment has always had the tacit approval of the "establishment". 

For as long as we've been members of the EU, we've been fed with bullshit headlines about bendy bananas, banning prawn cocktail crisps, and encyclopedia length regulations on how to sell lettuce. The only way the EU has ever entered the popular imagination is as a vague assemblance of busybodies and interfering jobsworths. That perception has had the tacit approval of the body politic, because there has never been an ounce of political will to represent the EU otherwise, or to really publicly acknowledge their role in British politics or British civic or cultural life at all.

In most other European countries, it seems that anti-EU movements tend to be more on the fringe or, at the very least, more overtly political in nature.

Some solid points there, and something I'd add to that is the media.

I've highlighted our media in this thread and others before, mentioning who owns and operates the newspapers we read on a daily basis, and the history they have of causing friction and uproar to suit their own ends. The carry-on with bendy bananas and other such shite is fed to the general population somehow, isn't it? They don't just pick that kind of shit up from nowhere.

It's the media. 

My experience is that the British media stands atop its own mountain of lies and bullshit in comparison to our EU neighbours. For sure, the media in Spain and Italy for example have their own agendas, but the slickness and brazenness of those agendas are nowhere near close to what we have in Britain.

We see it all the time, in various forms. whenever Germany play England at football, how many plays on the war do we get in sports headlines? Or when discussing the French with hints of cowardice and stereotyping?

How often do we see articles or headlines that paint EU leaders in a positive light? As beneficial partners? As actual people? Most of the time it's confrontation and suspicion that we're fed.

We can throw milkshakes at Farage and Robinson all fucking day, but until we realise that it's the media that provide these types with their platform, with their notoriety, we'll get nowhere. There's bigger factors at play than a failed banker and a guy who ran a moderately successful sunbed shop.

Our current political class is another matter entirely that needs completely rebuilding. We can't underestimate how much the sheer ineptitude of these chancers we have in power and in opposition has led to the success Farage and Robinson have seen in spreading their message.

[Dead Mike]

57 minutes ago, David said:

 

Where we're being failed is by our political class. As I mentioned above, the reason someone like Nige is able to do what he does is because we don't have anyone savvy enough to go toe to toe with him. He's a throwback to a bygone era, but he's also a political veteran, he knows what he's doing.

The rest of our politicians simply don't match up, and that's more a reflection on them than it is him being anything special.

 

I don’t think this is fair tbh. What we’re seeing with Farage is a situation where a politicians lies, dodgy private dealings & awful track history simply don’t matter to their supporters. It’s practically impossible to hold him to account because his supporters back him blindly, it’s almost ‘cult like’. How are you supposed to counter it? It’s easy to say ‘they’re not savvy enough’ but when you’ve got 1 side who can say whatever provable bollocks they like & it’s fine whereas the other side has to be squeaky clean then you’ve lost already.

If you think the answer is ‘the left’ trying to beat Farage at his own game then that’s simply dumbing politics down further to ‘who can tell the most popular lies’ & the right wing will ALWAYS ‘win’ as they’ve got fear & prejudice on their side. Add to this the fact that the likes of the BBC aim to provide ‘balance’ to their shows so for every NASA scientist they have on TV you also have someone who thinks the moon is made of cheese, they’re given equal time & the cheesy moon theory is given equal weight…’It’s easy for you to say this Mr NASA but there’s a large number of people who do believe the moon is made of cheese. Are you calling them liars? Do you think they’re stupid? Etc etc?’

[David]

12 minutes ago, Dead Mike said:

I don’t think this is fair tbh. What we’re seeing with Farage is a situation where a politicians lies, dodgy private dealings & awful track history simply don’t matter to their supporters. It’s practically impossible to hold him to account because his supporters back him blindly, it’s almost ‘cult like’. How are you supposed to counter it? It’s easy to say ‘they’re not savvy enough’ but when you’ve got 1 side who can say whatever provable bollocks they like & it’s fine whereas the other side has to be squeaky clean then you’ve lost already.

I don't think we see our politicians do enough to discredit Farage. They may have the facts needed, but their delivery is piss poor, they are easily shouted down, and when Farage goes on a rant they just sit there smiling uncomfortably or they get flustered altogether as we saw on QT recently. I can't remember the woman's name, but when she mentioned Norway "no longer" being in the EU I knew right away that Farage would be all over that, and he was. She got flustered, she started babbling and he let her hang herself, so to speak.

Being a politician is about more than being able to know the facts and figures, it's about being engaging and knowing how to grab an audiences attention. Farage knows how to do that, the rest for the most part don't.

So while it's not altogether about beating them at their own game, it does involve a bit of savvy to get the job done. I mentioned previously that Farage was a throwback of sorts, and it would be interesting to see if his shit would fly with some of the more experienced operators of the past.

For example, we see UKIP's David Coburn try similar tactics up in Scotland, but he's found himself going up against the likes of Patrick Harvie or the political juggernaut that is Alex Salmond, regardless of what we may think of him now.

Harvie and Salmond have on many occasions ripped the fella a new arsehole and made him look ridiculous. They didn't use information that isn't freely available to other politicians down south, they just know how to deliver their arguments in a compelling fashion, rather than sending everyone to sleep as we often see elsewhere in the UK.

[Dead Mike]

It doesn't matter though. Farage has been challenged but as you rightly say, he will just rant away, tell some more pleasing lies & most importantly,his supporters simply don't care. You could have the truth delivered in the slickest, most charismatic fashion & it won't trump 'We can't control our own borders & 3 millions Romanians are coming to get free houses while you all struggle to make ends meet'.

This is 'post-truth' politics playing to an audience who are 'sick of experts'.

[David]

6 minutes ago, Dead Mike said:

It doesn't matter though. Farage has been challenged but as you rightly say, he will just rant away, tell some more pleasing lies & most importantly,his supporters simply don't care. You could have the truth delivered in the slickest, most charismatic fashion & it won't trump 'We can't control our own borders & 3 millions Romanians are coming to get free houses while you all struggle to make ends meet'.

This is 'post-truth' politics playing to an audience who are 'sick of experts'.

It does matter though, because unless him and his ilk are dealt with in a manner that doesn't involve a tasty beverage of some sort we're fucked.

I know I may be biased somewhat, but what's needed is more characters like Bernard Ponsonby. So well known for taking cretins to task is old Bernie that the Home office actually refused to allow him to interview David Cameron on a number of occasions for fear of how the interview would go.

For the record, when UKIP types like Farage or Coburn chat shite there's a way of exposing them that works, as you'll see here;

 

[Factotum]

Farage is a blank slate which anyone can put any issue about the EU onto. He actually has no policies or anything interesting to say. He's whatever Aaron Banks wants him to be to the anti-EU brigade. It's down right damning on the media in this country that he isn't challenged more about his 'man of the people' shtick.

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Also, I see that there's controversy over his party funding, although that's been somewhat buried under the news that some pillock threw a milkshake at him. As I said, if you didn't know better you'd believe it was an orchestrated perfectly timed distraction to not only shift some of the spotlight off the funding issue, but to make him look like the poor victim.

Think James O'Brien mentioned this yesterday. Wouldn't be shocked if on the day Farage was utterly eviscerated by Gordon Brown, he would pay someone to do this.

[BomberPat]

Two points here;

One on the complicity of the media - I absolutely agree; several studies have found the British press to be the most biased, and the most right wing in Europe, and the Mail and the Sun are our best selling 'papers. The readership of most newspapers also skews older, which puts them in line with the demographics most likely to have voted Brexit - a chicken or egg scenario there, really.

What worries me, though, is that the younger generations who aren't reading newspapers, and likely aren't watching TV news either, are still consuming news somewhere. But they're likely consuming news third hand via social media, or via online news sources with even more significant biases than the papers. On social media they're likely in their "bubble", unlikely to come into contact with an opposing view aside from an extremist or reductionist argument by way of opposition. So I think the issue of the public not being given the right information, and everything being fed through biased filters, will get worse long before it gets better.

 

As far as challenging Farage goes, this is the problem with the debate culture that's taken over politics. Winning a debate is an exercise in public schoolboy rhetoric, it's not politics, and it helps no one. But it's held up as the measure of political know-how or intellectual expertise, but it's all just showmanship. On top of that, Farage is smart enough to know not to get himself into these situations - if only because his ego can't handle it. He's never going to put himself in a position where he can be exposed without a safety net.

On top of all that, I don't think it matters. The problem with trying to argue with someone who's dishonest and duplicitous is that you're the one doing all the work, and you're the only one arguing in good faith. Those of us on the left make this mistake all the time - we waste our energy, and our resources trying to refute or argue against a point that was never made in good faith in the first place. I don't know what the solution to that is, but that's where we are. 

[Carbomb]

Something that occurred to me is that it's possible this situation is much like any other adverse scenario when it comes to people, like war for example, in that the longer it's been allowed to go on, the less it becomes about the original reasons that it arose in the first place, eventually becoming personal. The suffering and general "feelbad factor" that has come about from the economic crash in 2008 (over eleven fucking years ago) has gone on for so long that, given an opportunity to have a direct hand in things rather than leave it up to the people who landed us in this shit in the first place, they're now taking that opportunity to enact their anger and resentment, instead of actually dealing with the problems and the causes of those problems, because at this point they just don't care any more. They just want someone to blame and castigate, and sly operators like Farage know how to channel and direct that energy at the targets they want to aim it at.

[JNLister]

An ardent Brexit-supporting Tory MP meets a Brexit supporter outside Parliament. You'd think they'd get on. You'd be very wrong.

 

[Chest Rockwell]

I know nothing about this guy, but that exchange made me like him a bit. Healing the divide! 

[David]

With all the shit going on in the UK it's easy to forget that there's a battle being fought all over Europe at the moment. This is an interesting look at how the rest of the EU is looking ahead of polling time

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The elections, which run through Sunday and take place in all of the European Union's 28 nations, have never had stakes this high. Europe's traditional political powerhouses — the center-right European People's Party and the center-left Socialists & Democrats — are set to lose some clout and face their strongest challenge yet from an array of populist, nationalist and far-right parties that are determined to claw back power from the EU for their own national governments.

This clash of basic values — between Europe growing more united or more divided — has put the continent at a historic political crossroads.

French President Emmanuel Macron, champion of the closer-integration camp, says the challenge at the polls this week is to "not cede to a coalition of destruction and disintegration" that will seek to dismantle the unity the EU has built up over the past six decades.

Facing off against Macron and Europe's traditional parties are Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, French far-right leader Marine Le Pen and a host of other populist, right-wing or far-right leaders who have vowed to fundamentally upend Europe's political landscape.

Nationalist leaders from 11 EU nations stood together in Milan last weekend — a show of unity unthinkable in previous years from a group once considered to be on Europe's political fringe. Salvini then declared "the extremists are in Brussels," the home of EU institutions, for wanting to retain the status quo.

"We need to do everything that is right to free this country, this continent, from the illegal occupation organized by Brussels," Salvini said. 

Europe's far-right and nationalist parties hope to emulate what President Donald Trump did in the 2016 U.S. election and what Brexiteers achieved in the U.K. referendum to leave the EU. That is to disrupt the powers that be, rail against what they see as an out-of-touch elite and warn against migrants massing at Europe's borders ready to rob the continent of its jobs and culture.

Standing with Salvini, Le Pen promised the far-right "will perform a historic feat," saying they could end up as high as the second-biggest political group in the EU parliament. Predictions show that is still extremely ambitious. Projections released by the European Parliament this month show the center-right European People's Party bloc losing 37 of its 217 seats and the center-left S&D group dropping from 186 seats to 149.

As for the far-right and nationalists, the Europe of Nations and Freedom group is predicted to win 62 seats, compared to 37 currently. Such statistics though could be irrelevant as soon as Monday if national parties start shifting to other EU-wide political groups in the 751-seat European legislature which meets both in Brussels and France's Strasbourg.

Orban's nationalist Fidesz party is now in the EPP's ranks, but has been suspended for its anti-EU stance and virulent anti-migration rhetoric. The Hungarian prime minister might well bolt after the election to a new radical-right group, perhaps to be formed by Salvini, Le Pen and other nationalist leaders.

For many among the EU's half billion citizens, the memories of war have vanished and the EU's role in helping to keep the peace for 75 years, a feat for which it won the Nobel Prize, is overlooked.

Yet Europe was body-slammed by the financial crisis a decade ago and struggled through a yearslong debt crisis that saw nations like Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Cyprus get bailouts and produced recessions that slashed the incomes of millions.

Europe's high taxes, stagnant wages and gap between rich and poor are still a sore point, highlighted now by weekly protests by France's yellow vest movement demanding more help for hard-pressed workers. EU nations have also not been able to forge a common approach to migration, fueling inter-bloc tensions, and its impotence in quickly containing a migrant influx in 2015 has propelled a surge of support for far-right and nationalist parties.

"We have a crisis of the European Union. This is a matter of fact," Macron acknowledged. Experts say he's right. "There are a lot of people who fear that things potentially are moving in the wrong direction or already have moved in the wrong direction," said Janis Emmanouilidis at the European Policy Centre think-tank in Brussels. "It is a mix of multiple insecurities which, at the end of the day, is pushing people toward those who are coming up with easy answers."

Since the first European Parliament election in 1979, the legislature has slowly changed from a toothless organization where over-the-hill politicians got cushy pre-retirement jobs to a potent force with real decision-making powers.

The EU at first primarily regulated farming but now sets international trade policy for all members and even monetary rules for the 19 nations who use the shared euro currency. The legislature itself affects Europeans' daily lives in thousands of ways: cutting smartphone roaming charges, imposing safety and health rules for industries ranging from chemicals and energy to autos and food, supporting farming, reforming copyright rules and protecting the environment.

There are no cross-border elections this week, just national polls in 28 nations. Each EU nation gets a number of seats in the EU parliament based on its population. Cyprus, Luxembourg and Malta have the fewest seats with six each, while the EU's most populous member, Germany, has 96 seats.

Up until now, EU elections were tepid affairs. Voter turnout slumped to just 42.6% in 2014 — but that could well change this year.

The pro-EU side says increasing integration is essential for the EU to survive in a globalized world. Euroskeptics say it robs national identity whenever more decisions are made at EU headquarters in Brussels.

Yet even some mainstream conservatives can have a euroskeptic streak. Czech politician Jan Zahradil, lead candidate for the Alliance of Conservatives and Reformists, is among those seeking to return more control to Europe's national capitals.

"(We want) an EU that is scaled back, that is flexible, that is decentralized," Zahradil said. "(An EU) that respects national governments and that cooperates with them, that doesn't fight them, that doesn't patronize them, that doesn't lecture them."

For the pro-EU side, in a world in which China, the U.S. and Russia are all flexing their political and financial muscles, Macron urges voters to think about the strength and unity that comes from 28 smaller nations working together.

"If you fragment Europe, there is no chance you have a stronger Europe. Unity makes strength," Macron said.

Associated Press writers Lorne Cook in Brussels, Angela Charlton in Paris, Elena Becatoros in Athens and Colleen Barry in Milan contributed to this report.

 

Edited May 22, 2019 by David

[JNLister]

One point to add to that is that the two main centre-left/centre-right blocks (which are roughly equivalent to Labour and a pre-Euroinsanity Conservative) have always had more than half the seats between them. There aren't any formal coalitions or power-sharing agreements as that isn't how the European Parliament works (and there's no whipping), but its always meant that broadly mainstream/centrist proposals will pass the Parliament. 

With the forecast changes, that will no longer be the case, so anything that passes will need support of a more left-wing or right-wing group.

[JNLister]

This probably counts as live chat, but it sounds like shit is going down with May being pressured to quit. I know it's a cliche to say the Brexit vote rewrote the rules on politics, but the Prime Minister resigning the day before a national election would be... unusual.