 |
| http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150313-the-toughest-animals-on-earth |
Saturday, September 29, 2018
Weekend Wonders: the Tardigrade
Friday, September 28, 2018
FRIDAY MUSIC: Salad Days, by JD
Before he made the "Star Wars" series of films, the director George Lucas made a few low budget films. One of them turned out to be the best film he ever made - "American Graffiti" and in 1995, the United States Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.
The film is set in 1962 and is to a certain extent autobiographical in that it reflects Lucas' own teenage years in Modesto, California. The story line is in reality incosequential because the film is a study of the cruising and rock and roll cultures popular among the post–World War II baby boom generation. The film is a series of vignettes, telling the story of a group of teenagers and their adventures over a single night, that night being the last day of summer. The following day would see one of the principal characters leaving town to start college. The series of vignettes is set against a soundtrack of 41 popular songs of the period with the voice of radio DJ, Wolfman Jack, hovering in the background. Each of the songs reflects the story line as it unfolds which gives an operatic quality to the film, a teenage opera in fact.
It is 45 years since the film was released and I remember it well; looking at the clips it dawned on me that 1962 was a pivotal year. It was the end of an age of innocence and optimism, it was when the 'American Dream' died.
In 1963 JFK was murdered and then the country sank into the quagmire of Vietnam. Everything changed, nothing would ever be the same again.
Lucas was aware of the change of mood because the film ends with stills of the four main characters and captions telling of their subsequent fates.
But the music, ah the music. It was innocent, it was optimistic but above all it was singalong melodic and beautifully nostalgic for an oldie like me!
The film is set in 1962 and is to a certain extent autobiographical in that it reflects Lucas' own teenage years in Modesto, California. The story line is in reality incosequential because the film is a study of the cruising and rock and roll cultures popular among the post–World War II baby boom generation. The film is a series of vignettes, telling the story of a group of teenagers and their adventures over a single night, that night being the last day of summer. The following day would see one of the principal characters leaving town to start college. The series of vignettes is set against a soundtrack of 41 popular songs of the period with the voice of radio DJ, Wolfman Jack, hovering in the background. Each of the songs reflects the story line as it unfolds which gives an operatic quality to the film, a teenage opera in fact.
It is 45 years since the film was released and I remember it well; looking at the clips it dawned on me that 1962 was a pivotal year. It was the end of an age of innocence and optimism, it was when the 'American Dream' died.
In 1963 JFK was murdered and then the country sank into the quagmire of Vietnam. Everything changed, nothing would ever be the same again.
Lucas was aware of the change of mood because the film ends with stills of the four main characters and captions telling of their subsequent fates.
But the music, ah the music. It was innocent, it was optimistic but above all it was singalong melodic and beautifully nostalgic for an oldie like me!
Thursday, September 27, 2018
Killing Killing Eve
Killing Eve, an eight-part TV series made for BBC America, is successful and has been widely praised - even by Peter Hitchens*, who thereby persuaded me to have a look.
But I wonder if it is not obscene.
The 1959 Obscene Publications Act, later updated in the Broadcasting Act 1990 to include broadcast matter, makes the issue one of whether a publication is likely to "deprave and corrupt."
The test was explained - yet not fully clarified - in an 1868 case: "the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall."
Note that it does not have to have this effect on everyone who accesses the material, merely those who are susceptible.
What concerns me is not only the extreme violence, though there is an incident in the first episode I would pay money to be able to forget entirely. It is the complete lack of empathy and even sadistic joy shown by the murderess, smilingly observing the suffering of her dying victims.
We are a simian species, and "monkey see, monkey do."
Film director Stanley Kubrick withdrew his 1971 film "A Clockwork Orange" from British cinemas in 1973 following a murder in Bletchley that seems to have had some connection. Kubrick denied art's power to influence behaviour: "people cannot be made to do things which are at odds with their natures." But the question remains, can art influence someone who has that potential, to actualise it?
I have read - and perhaps my source, which I can't remember, was wrong - that one purpose of the ancient Games in Rome was to keep encouraging violent tendencies and lack of empathy in the Roman people so that they could continue to be the fearsomely cruel and warlike masters of the known world.
Even a libertarian is likely to draw the line at allowing freedoms that harm others. And if some susceptible person in my neighbourhood watches this kind of material and could be influenced to unleash his demon on me or mine, I have a legitimate interest in questioning the licensing of material likely to deprave.
In the UK case where Lewis Daynes murdered Breck Brednar, a boy he had groomed on the Internet, the boys had spent time playing violent video games online together, and Daynes was also said to have been "obsessed with videos of terrorist beheadings." Not all imagination leads to action, but don't many actions begin in imagination?
The first episode of Killing Eve is supposed to have been seen by over 5 million people in the UK so far (live or streamed afterwards). The wider the audience, the greater the chances that someone on the edge will see it and do - something.
Killing Eve is most skilfully acted and directed, with high production values. But if its effect is obscene, then the better it is made, the worse it offends.
___________________________
* "I didn't expect or even want to like the new BBC series Killing Eve, starring Jodie Comer, pictured, as a distractingly beautiful embodiment of pure evil.
"The trailers put me off. But the programme itself is an unexpected joy, looking and sounding witty, refusing to treat viewers as idiots, and, actually, a lot better than the overrated Bodyguard."
- https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-6197645/PETER-HITCHENS-Norway-escape-PM-begging-Brussels.html
But I wonder if it is not obscene.
The 1959 Obscene Publications Act, later updated in the Broadcasting Act 1990 to include broadcast matter, makes the issue one of whether a publication is likely to "deprave and corrupt."
The test was explained - yet not fully clarified - in an 1868 case: "the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall."
Note that it does not have to have this effect on everyone who accesses the material, merely those who are susceptible.
What concerns me is not only the extreme violence, though there is an incident in the first episode I would pay money to be able to forget entirely. It is the complete lack of empathy and even sadistic joy shown by the murderess, smilingly observing the suffering of her dying victims.
We are a simian species, and "monkey see, monkey do."
Film director Stanley Kubrick withdrew his 1971 film "A Clockwork Orange" from British cinemas in 1973 following a murder in Bletchley that seems to have had some connection. Kubrick denied art's power to influence behaviour: "people cannot be made to do things which are at odds with their natures." But the question remains, can art influence someone who has that potential, to actualise it?
I have read - and perhaps my source, which I can't remember, was wrong - that one purpose of the ancient Games in Rome was to keep encouraging violent tendencies and lack of empathy in the Roman people so that they could continue to be the fearsomely cruel and warlike masters of the known world.
Even a libertarian is likely to draw the line at allowing freedoms that harm others. And if some susceptible person in my neighbourhood watches this kind of material and could be influenced to unleash his demon on me or mine, I have a legitimate interest in questioning the licensing of material likely to deprave.
In the UK case where Lewis Daynes murdered Breck Brednar, a boy he had groomed on the Internet, the boys had spent time playing violent video games online together, and Daynes was also said to have been "obsessed with videos of terrorist beheadings." Not all imagination leads to action, but don't many actions begin in imagination?
The first episode of Killing Eve is supposed to have been seen by over 5 million people in the UK so far (live or streamed afterwards). The wider the audience, the greater the chances that someone on the edge will see it and do - something.
Killing Eve is most skilfully acted and directed, with high production values. But if its effect is obscene, then the better it is made, the worse it offends.
___________________________
* "I didn't expect or even want to like the new BBC series Killing Eve, starring Jodie Comer, pictured, as a distractingly beautiful embodiment of pure evil.
"The trailers put me off. But the programme itself is an unexpected joy, looking and sounding witty, refusing to treat viewers as idiots, and, actually, a lot better than the overrated Bodyguard."
- https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-6197645/PETER-HITCHENS-Norway-escape-PM-begging-Brussels.html
Sunday, September 23, 2018
Friday, September 21, 2018
FRIDAY MUSIC: Sam Amidon, by JD
The BBC Proms may be over but they continue to provide a rich source of music, sometimes in ways that were not quite intended. There was one prom given over to Jacob Collier who is apparently a rising star of the music world. But his hyperactive performance, running around the stage like an excitable toddler, trying to play every instrument in reach, was underwhelming to say the least. His attempt at playing a version of a song by the pop group The Police was even worse than the original; no mean achievement.
The redeeming feature of the night were his guest artists of whom Sam Amidon was outstanding. He is a folk singer in the American tradition but he draws on many influences to modify his style of folk music and give it an individual twist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Amidon
The redeeming feature of the night were his guest artists of whom Sam Amidon was outstanding. He is a folk singer in the American tradition but he draws on many influences to modify his style of folk music and give it an individual twist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Amidon
Thursday, September 20, 2018
Brexit and free trade: between the devil and the deep blue sea
The EU has forgotten its mission, and we haven't worked out ours.
The European Union began as a common market, gradually abolishing tariffs internally while agreeing on external tariffs, so economically it was about the Four Freedoms (goods and services, capital and labour) among its members and protectionism in their collective relations with the rest of the world.
This would work so long as the members were largely similar. When the European Economic Community was first formed in 1957, its members were the Benelux countries plus France, Germany and Italy: a contiguous grouping of modern industrial nations. They could realistically aim for freedom of movement without risking potentially destabilising levels of migration. Having said that, Southern Italy lagged behind in its economic development and there was a long history of migration from there to northern Italian cities and abroad to the USA; yet otherwise, there were not such stark inequalities as to threaten chaotic mass population flows.
But the EU and its antecedents were not merely or even principally about establishing a trading bloc, and as its membership grew so did the tensions between its disparate objectives. For example, the founders of the EU aimed to prevent another war in continental Europe, yet the EU has interfered in the now-divided Ukraine in a way that threatens a direct confrontation between major global military powers. Also, the ambition to steer the EU into becoming a single nation via (among other things) fiscal union led the EU to welcome Greece into the Eurozone despite disqualifications that Goldman Sachs helped the Greeks to disguise and the EU's leadership pretended not to see; with distressing consequences for the Greek nation. Again, though the underlying philosophy of the EU is socialist, the admission of countries with far lower systems of wages and prices opened the way for economic competition that depressed the wages and conditions of the working classes of the more advanced EU members - a process both warned about by the late Sir James Goldsmith in 1994 at the time of the GATT talks and also now admitted in a recent publication widely misreported as contradicting such claims:“Some evidence that migration reduces employment and raises unemployment of some groups (e.g. the young and less well-educated)… Some evidence that migration has reduced earnings growth for the lower-paid… Evidence that migration, especially lower-skilled, has reduced the prices of [i.e.wages earned in] personal services… Evidence that migration has raised house prices, more in areas where housebuilding is more restricted.”
Enlargement was not the initiative of the EU only; other nations had to decide whether it was in their interest to apply for membership. In this context it is worth noting that the British Prime Minister who decided that this was the future for the UK was not Harold Wilson or Ted Heath but Heath's former boss, Harold Macmillan, who had set Heath on to explore the constitutional implications of membership. Lord Kilmuir replied to Heath in December 1960 (see end of linked document) warning of the many difficulties involved.
By the way, it has been said that the British electorate were not told, later, in 1975, of the concomitant loss of sovereignty. Not so; but there was an orchestrated campaign to bury the bad news in verbiage and drown it in talk of "FOOD and MONEY and JOBS."
Yet the then PM decided to go ahead: "On 26 July 1961, Harold Macmillan, the UK prime minister, informally told the Taoiseach, Seán Lemass, that his government had finally come to a decision to join the EEC as a full member. With respect to this hotly-debated issue, Macmillan wrote that: 'after weighing all the considerations we have reached the conclusion that the right course for us is to seek to enter into negotiations with the Six'."
In turn this threatened Ireland's existing economic arrangements with the UK: "In brief, Ireland exported agricultural products to the UK without restrictions and exported industrial products under a preferential arrangement; in turn, the UK had recourse to cheap agricultural goods and a market for its industrial goods. Of course, if such an agreement was to continue indefinitely, Ireland would have been economically protected, though at the same time, it would also still be in a position of acute, even reinforced, dependence. However, the prospect of losing these arrangements, first to EFTA and now to the EEC, had a remarkably sobering effect upon Irish policy-makers." In the event, Ireland and the UK joined at the same time in 1973, thus getting round the hard-border problem of its day.
But Ireland's difficulties did not end there. She joined the Eurozone in 1999, prompting an influx of money that not only filled the pubs for Sunday lunches but also inflated the housing market; and the fallout from the property-related Global Financial Crisis less than a decade later broke her two biggest banks, despite the Irish Government's underwriting their losses. In the interests of monetary conservatism the European Central bank then required Eire to repay the €31 billion of failed emergency support, financing the operation with a huge loan from the ECB. The still-ongoing process of withdrawing such a large amount of money from circulation (over €10,000 per registered voter, ignoring the "money multiplier" effect) plus paying the interest, has crippled Ireland's economy with deflation.
In short, the inconsistent aims of the EU have led to difficulties that no-one would have wished; difficulties compounded by an organisational structure designed to foster "ever-closer union" at the cost of suppressing democratic feedback; a structure reminiscent of the 1871 Wilhelmine Constitution of Germany, as I said some time ago, and which similarly has the potential to provoke social unrest, and the defiance and possibly even secession of some member states.
Resistance to Britain's membership of the EU came from the patriots of the British Left as well as from those of the Right. Coldly glared at by Ted Heath, Peter Shore delivered a stirring pre-Referendum speech to the Oxford Union in 1975, speaking not only of the deliberate and unwarranted undermining of national confidence but also of our deteriorating trade and financial balance as a consequence of having joined. Whether or not the imbalance (e.g. in the coal and steel markets) was deliberately planned by the EU, as some allege, the accumulated losses plus the financial support we contributed to the Union have cost us dearly, not merely in money but in domestically-owned productive capacity.
Over 40 years ago, Peter Shore referred ironically to misconceptions of our "tottering about" the world stage, but it is now a moot point whether we can indeed stand on our own two feet any more. Much of our manufacturing, even of our infrastructure, is multinational- or foreign-owned, as Alex Brummer detailed five years ago in his book "Britain For Sale." We have lost so many levers of our economic power and it will be a major battle to recover them, to rebuild. Do we have the stomach for the fight?
Some in the pro-Brexit camp offer as an alternative to EU serfdom, the freedom to trade globally. Now if this means without any carefully-considered system of tariffs and mutually beneficial trade agreements, it could be jumping from the frying pan into the fire. We could, for example, import cheaper food from the Third World; but what would that mean for what is left of our farming and fishing industries?
When De Gaulle was President of France, he opposed Britain's entry into the EU partly because he saw us as a Trojan horse for American exports to Europe. This was the protectionist face of the EU and up to a point that is justifiable.
If tariffs are merely a wall, then they risk a trade war - and if President Trump overplays that hand that is what he may get from China. But what if agreements on tariffs and trade were not the free-for-all sought by GATT, but designed as a kind of braking and steering system? In a globalised economy there is so much risk of lurching about and crashing that something has to be done to slow the rate of change. If import duties are calibrated to give the domestic labour force a fighting chance, then there is the possibility of all of us raising our game; otherwise, all we face here is abject defeat.
We have an over-large population in the UK, one that we cannot adequately feed from our own land and shores, and one whose prospects of gainful employment is undermined by the Internet and robotics as much as by faraway foreign labour that is paid a tenth of our hourly rate. We need a national plan for increasing our ability to survive in a world that is becoming more chaotic and in which energy is becoming more expensive.
Getting free from the gear-grinding, self-wrecking machine of the EU is not the end of the story, but the very beginning.
_____________________________________
file:///C:/Users/Welcome/Downloads/901-686-1-PB%20(1).pdf
https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/dspace-jspui/bitstream/2134/2355/5/CHAPTER3.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PQrz8F0dBI
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/740991/Final_EEA_report_to_go_to_WEB.PDF#page=115
file:///C:/Users/Welcome/Downloads/RP10-79%20(1).pdf
https://www.facebook.com/Lukemingflanagan/videos/2347861728575077/
https://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.com/2018/09/the-selmayr-scandal-straight-and.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoO6146qM5g
http://www.harvard-digital.co.uk/euro/pamphlet.htm
https://digital.library.lse.ac.uk/collections/brexit/1975
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Britain-Sale-British-Companies-Foreign/dp/1847940765
The European Union began as a common market, gradually abolishing tariffs internally while agreeing on external tariffs, so economically it was about the Four Freedoms (goods and services, capital and labour) among its members and protectionism in their collective relations with the rest of the world.
This would work so long as the members were largely similar. When the European Economic Community was first formed in 1957, its members were the Benelux countries plus France, Germany and Italy: a contiguous grouping of modern industrial nations. They could realistically aim for freedom of movement without risking potentially destabilising levels of migration. Having said that, Southern Italy lagged behind in its economic development and there was a long history of migration from there to northern Italian cities and abroad to the USA; yet otherwise, there were not such stark inequalities as to threaten chaotic mass population flows.
But the EU and its antecedents were not merely or even principally about establishing a trading bloc, and as its membership grew so did the tensions between its disparate objectives. For example, the founders of the EU aimed to prevent another war in continental Europe, yet the EU has interfered in the now-divided Ukraine in a way that threatens a direct confrontation between major global military powers. Also, the ambition to steer the EU into becoming a single nation via (among other things) fiscal union led the EU to welcome Greece into the Eurozone despite disqualifications that Goldman Sachs helped the Greeks to disguise and the EU's leadership pretended not to see; with distressing consequences for the Greek nation. Again, though the underlying philosophy of the EU is socialist, the admission of countries with far lower systems of wages and prices opened the way for economic competition that depressed the wages and conditions of the working classes of the more advanced EU members - a process both warned about by the late Sir James Goldsmith in 1994 at the time of the GATT talks and also now admitted in a recent publication widely misreported as contradicting such claims:“Some evidence that migration reduces employment and raises unemployment of some groups (e.g. the young and less well-educated)… Some evidence that migration has reduced earnings growth for the lower-paid… Evidence that migration, especially lower-skilled, has reduced the prices of [i.e.wages earned in] personal services… Evidence that migration has raised house prices, more in areas where housebuilding is more restricted.”
Enlargement was not the initiative of the EU only; other nations had to decide whether it was in their interest to apply for membership. In this context it is worth noting that the British Prime Minister who decided that this was the future for the UK was not Harold Wilson or Ted Heath but Heath's former boss, Harold Macmillan, who had set Heath on to explore the constitutional implications of membership. Lord Kilmuir replied to Heath in December 1960 (see end of linked document) warning of the many difficulties involved.
By the way, it has been said that the British electorate were not told, later, in 1975, of the concomitant loss of sovereignty. Not so; but there was an orchestrated campaign to bury the bad news in verbiage and drown it in talk of "FOOD and MONEY and JOBS."
Yet the then PM decided to go ahead: "On 26 July 1961, Harold Macmillan, the UK prime minister, informally told the Taoiseach, Seán Lemass, that his government had finally come to a decision to join the EEC as a full member. With respect to this hotly-debated issue, Macmillan wrote that: 'after weighing all the considerations we have reached the conclusion that the right course for us is to seek to enter into negotiations with the Six'."
In turn this threatened Ireland's existing economic arrangements with the UK: "In brief, Ireland exported agricultural products to the UK without restrictions and exported industrial products under a preferential arrangement; in turn, the UK had recourse to cheap agricultural goods and a market for its industrial goods. Of course, if such an agreement was to continue indefinitely, Ireland would have been economically protected, though at the same time, it would also still be in a position of acute, even reinforced, dependence. However, the prospect of losing these arrangements, first to EFTA and now to the EEC, had a remarkably sobering effect upon Irish policy-makers." In the event, Ireland and the UK joined at the same time in 1973, thus getting round the hard-border problem of its day.
But Ireland's difficulties did not end there. She joined the Eurozone in 1999, prompting an influx of money that not only filled the pubs for Sunday lunches but also inflated the housing market; and the fallout from the property-related Global Financial Crisis less than a decade later broke her two biggest banks, despite the Irish Government's underwriting their losses. In the interests of monetary conservatism the European Central bank then required Eire to repay the €31 billion of failed emergency support, financing the operation with a huge loan from the ECB. The still-ongoing process of withdrawing such a large amount of money from circulation (over €10,000 per registered voter, ignoring the "money multiplier" effect) plus paying the interest, has crippled Ireland's economy with deflation.
In short, the inconsistent aims of the EU have led to difficulties that no-one would have wished; difficulties compounded by an organisational structure designed to foster "ever-closer union" at the cost of suppressing democratic feedback; a structure reminiscent of the 1871 Wilhelmine Constitution of Germany, as I said some time ago, and which similarly has the potential to provoke social unrest, and the defiance and possibly even secession of some member states.
Resistance to Britain's membership of the EU came from the patriots of the British Left as well as from those of the Right. Coldly glared at by Ted Heath, Peter Shore delivered a stirring pre-Referendum speech to the Oxford Union in 1975, speaking not only of the deliberate and unwarranted undermining of national confidence but also of our deteriorating trade and financial balance as a consequence of having joined. Whether or not the imbalance (e.g. in the coal and steel markets) was deliberately planned by the EU, as some allege, the accumulated losses plus the financial support we contributed to the Union have cost us dearly, not merely in money but in domestically-owned productive capacity.
Over 40 years ago, Peter Shore referred ironically to misconceptions of our "tottering about" the world stage, but it is now a moot point whether we can indeed stand on our own two feet any more. Much of our manufacturing, even of our infrastructure, is multinational- or foreign-owned, as Alex Brummer detailed five years ago in his book "Britain For Sale." We have lost so many levers of our economic power and it will be a major battle to recover them, to rebuild. Do we have the stomach for the fight?
Some in the pro-Brexit camp offer as an alternative to EU serfdom, the freedom to trade globally. Now if this means without any carefully-considered system of tariffs and mutually beneficial trade agreements, it could be jumping from the frying pan into the fire. We could, for example, import cheaper food from the Third World; but what would that mean for what is left of our farming and fishing industries?
When De Gaulle was President of France, he opposed Britain's entry into the EU partly because he saw us as a Trojan horse for American exports to Europe. This was the protectionist face of the EU and up to a point that is justifiable.
If tariffs are merely a wall, then they risk a trade war - and if President Trump overplays that hand that is what he may get from China. But what if agreements on tariffs and trade were not the free-for-all sought by GATT, but designed as a kind of braking and steering system? In a globalised economy there is so much risk of lurching about and crashing that something has to be done to slow the rate of change. If import duties are calibrated to give the domestic labour force a fighting chance, then there is the possibility of all of us raising our game; otherwise, all we face here is abject defeat.
We have an over-large population in the UK, one that we cannot adequately feed from our own land and shores, and one whose prospects of gainful employment is undermined by the Internet and robotics as much as by faraway foreign labour that is paid a tenth of our hourly rate. We need a national plan for increasing our ability to survive in a world that is becoming more chaotic and in which energy is becoming more expensive.
Getting free from the gear-grinding, self-wrecking machine of the EU is not the end of the story, but the very beginning.
_____________________________________
file:///C:/Users/Welcome/Downloads/901-686-1-PB%20(1).pdf
https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/dspace-jspui/bitstream/2134/2355/5/CHAPTER3.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PQrz8F0dBI
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/740991/Final_EEA_report_to_go_to_WEB.PDF#page=115
file:///C:/Users/Welcome/Downloads/RP10-79%20(1).pdf
https://www.facebook.com/Lukemingflanagan/videos/2347861728575077/
https://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.com/2018/09/the-selmayr-scandal-straight-and.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoO6146qM5g
http://www.harvard-digital.co.uk/euro/pamphlet.htm
https://digital.library.lse.ac.uk/collections/brexit/1975
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Britain-Sale-British-Companies-Foreign/dp/1847940765
Sunday, September 16, 2018
BREXIT: The Left Has Forgotten Its Business
In response to an avowedly left-wing blogger on the tenth anniversary of the Lehman-led Crash:
I was with you all the way until you started on the because-Brexit riff.
Surely you are aware that Cameron promised a referendum because (a) he didn't think he'd have to make good on it, since he expected to lead another coalition government and (b) he thought it would finally expose and shut up a vocal minority of fruitcakes and loons in check shirts and corduroy trousers - below-stairs people.
He then spent millions of public money to urge Remain, and brought over that poseur Obama to add his thumb to the scales. And when Cameron saw the result, he left, because it looked too much like hard work and Etonians do not labour.
Since then Theresa May has played a blinder, busting a gut to make sure that anything like a meaningful Brexit doesn't happen.
Why?
Because the EU is a model village of globalism, which has kept down workers' wages and hugely benefited the traders and large businesses you so rightly criticise. Why do you think that practically everywhere in England and Wales except for the rich South-East had a clear majority for Leave? Frank Field made the class-economic issue clear in a clip still circulating on the Internet, before the vote. And the late Sir James Goldsmith forecast the potential for growing inequality and social unrest, way back in 1994 when the GATT talks were on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PQrz8F0dBI
And then there's the matter of democracy. The more you look at the EU the more you will see how it is part of a move towards global managerialism and the silencing of the ordinary person. The sneerocracy acts as though it thinks the commoners should never have been allowed a vote in the first place.
I simply do not understand why the Left - not the I'm-all-right-jack Blairites - has not run up its flag for democracy and the interests of the working class.
I was with you all the way until you started on the because-Brexit riff.
Surely you are aware that Cameron promised a referendum because (a) he didn't think he'd have to make good on it, since he expected to lead another coalition government and (b) he thought it would finally expose and shut up a vocal minority of fruitcakes and loons in check shirts and corduroy trousers - below-stairs people.
He then spent millions of public money to urge Remain, and brought over that poseur Obama to add his thumb to the scales. And when Cameron saw the result, he left, because it looked too much like hard work and Etonians do not labour.
Since then Theresa May has played a blinder, busting a gut to make sure that anything like a meaningful Brexit doesn't happen.
Why?
Because the EU is a model village of globalism, which has kept down workers' wages and hugely benefited the traders and large businesses you so rightly criticise. Why do you think that practically everywhere in England and Wales except for the rich South-East had a clear majority for Leave? Frank Field made the class-economic issue clear in a clip still circulating on the Internet, before the vote. And the late Sir James Goldsmith forecast the potential for growing inequality and social unrest, way back in 1994 when the GATT talks were on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PQrz8F0dBI
And then there's the matter of democracy. The more you look at the EU the more you will see how it is part of a move towards global managerialism and the silencing of the ordinary person. The sneerocracy acts as though it thinks the commoners should never have been allowed a vote in the first place.
I simply do not understand why the Left - not the I'm-all-right-jack Blairites - has not run up its flag for democracy and the interests of the working class.
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