one out all out: a brexit from the modern world and every one of its problems please (we're all gonna die lol)

glinner's long game part 2

https://img.maximummedia.ie/joe_co_uk/eyJkYXRhIjoie1widXJsXCI6XCJodHRwOlxcXC9cXFwvbWVkaWEtam9lY291ay5tYXhpbXVtbWVkaWEuaWUuczMuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbVxcXC93cC1jb250ZW50XFxcL3VwbG9hZHNcXFwvMjAxOFxcXC8xMFxcXC8yMDIwMTMxMFxcXC9jaHVrYWFhLTEwMjR4NTQ2LnBuZ1wiLFwid2lkdGhcIjo3NDAsXCJoZWlnaHRcIjo0MTYsXCJkZWZhdWx0XCI6XCJodHRwczpcXFwvXFxcL3d3dy5qb2UuY28udWtcXFwvYXNzZXRzXFxcL2ltYWdlc1xcXC9qb2Vjb3VrXFxcL25vLWltYWdlLnBuZz92PTVcIn0iLCJoYXNoIjoiZTE5NzU2NGM5M2NhZjZmMDQyNGM5OGRiNWE3ZDU0YzVkYjJlMTM2YiJ9/chukaaa-1024x546.png

2nd ref vote Leave campaign poster.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DqBt6D7XcAAwPud.jpg
lol @Godwin'sFuckwit's Law!

why

why are if ye are which it seems ye are

against the march for a second vote

good old-fashioned British bloodymindedness iirc

just loathe the political players behind it with eternal venom and find the people involved with it laughable at best.

If that were, say, a bizarro post itt nobody would blink an eye

is this the thing about centrists again

I know I'm not the only person who even if I'd rationalised the various self interest reasons to vote Remain in a 2nd ref, would actually trust myself to do it at the polling station. And this is not something I felt at the first ref.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DqByrkyWoAAwHbf.jpg

"is this the thing about centrists again"

The whole problem is that they keep trying to do this with exactly the same wankers who pushed people into the arms of Leave in the first place, but at least Nick Clegg has had the good sense to absent himself this time. That's partly a self-selecting issue - party lines mean the only pro-EU politicians who can get away with turning up at an event like this are those who no longer have careers left, and who happen to represent Remain-voting seats. David Lammy is pretty much the only one I have any respect for.

That Chuka/Anna Soubry picture suggests he's learned nothing from what happened to Scottish Labour around the independence referendum - is it that hard to just march on your own, or with people from their own party?

But I was at the Iraq protests in 2003 and I remember full well how that was dismissed as a middle class day out, the way in which the voices who didn't fit in with that caricature were ignored or just erased from the conversation.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexwickham/chuka-umunna-centrist-think-tank-65000

To be fair if I was Chuka I would cash in before everyone twigged what a limited politician I was.

Best thing is for £451 an hour alls he has to do c+p some twitter centrist parody accounts into some kind of "content" and no-one at Progressive Centre UK will notice the difference.

There’s more to it than that’s. as far as I’m concerned, none of these people have learned anything in the last two years. If you read the article about Irish people in Britain and how Brexit is magnifying those tensions, then you might understand how I felt when I saw the author attacked by a former Labour MP/vocal remainer as being “hateful”. White EU immigrants are valuable, except when they’re speaking up about the imperialism and blindness that comprised many of the arguments for Leave.

If you see Corbyn being constantly attacked by #fbpe types on twitter while they continue to fawn over the Tory rebels (who vote with the government every time when it counts), you might question their motives.

If you see people wrapped in EU flags and treating the whole thing as a simple issue, as they characterise the same EU that lets refugees drown daily in the Med and that has slept on the rise of fascism within its borders as inherently progressive, then you might wonder who they think they are helping. Corbyn’s 7/10 is how I feel about the EU, but I’ve been attacked by Remainers who just don’t want to hear it. If you can’t even engage with some of the real criticisms of the EU, how can you hope to defend it?

People advocating for Remain while making the argument that immigrants can be deported under EU law or giving oxygen to the legitimate concerns crowd - who are they standing for? What have they learned? Why are they legitimising these views instead of challenging them?

Alastair Campbell and Tony Blair deciding to become prominent advocates for Remain when the Iraq war was one of the two main events that led to the death of trust in the establishment - what are they going to do if a 2nd ref leads to an even more emphatic Leave vote and the right decide to start saying the quiet parts loud even more than they are doing?

Are any of the 2nd ref people engaging with the Leave voters and the issues that led to both the first referendum
and its result in a meaningful way or are they painting their faces blue and yellow and thinking that that constitutes a winning argument?

TL;dr these people are utter charlatans who’ve learned nothing, and who will directly endanger lots of people by pressing for this nonsense.

Sorry if incoherent but it enrages me how these people carry on and don’t care about the consequences.

good post gyac.

Or, more succinctly:

On today's march, I ducked into Pret along with many other People's Voters. It was heaving and chaotic, but we formed genteel queues, laughing - "No, no, after you -" "Do you mind if I just?" - because decent. Because cooperative. Because positive. Because properly British.

— Dominic Minghella (@DMinghella) October 20, 2018

He also retweeted a post attacking the Labour leadership for not being there. Abbott and McDonnell were attending an event against fascism which is of greater value than a million of these marches.

it doesn't seem that long ago these idiots were publicly trying to blame Corbyn for Brexit. I can remember Chuka clowning about with IDS on Today, on the referendum day, joking about what a shit leader Corbyn was and jokingly referring to him as "our star striker" when he was supposed to campaigning for remain.

They’re still doing it!

true! But they thought they going to be able to cynically use it as a pretext for replacing him back then.

were

Unlike a lot of people I don't actually believe that every issue revolves around Corbyn and what he thinks and this one certainly doesn't. But when you look at the behaviour of Blair and Campbell on this issue (and I don't doubt that they genuinely believe in it) you do have to wonder what their endgame is.

Blair in particular has been much more vocal about Brexit (and Corbyn) than he was about the austerity policies that amounted to the systematic dismantling of most of the good things that his government did, that led to Brexit in the first place, and about which he was largely silent. At least when Brown makes an intervention it's about something of substance, with Blair you get the sense that it's solely about preserving what remains of his legacy. And Blair has been a key proponent of this 'Remain, but with controls on immigration' fantasy that literally no one in the EU would take seriously.

My main issue with these people is that it's so exasperating because, imperfect as the EU is, there doesn't appear to be any kind of Brexit that isn't a disaster in the making. They need to get this right and they just aren't.

I also think that trying to make the issue all about Corbyn is seriously counterproductive for Remain - a lot of young left people in this country, probably the vast majority of them, are pro-EU and pro-Remain and also pro-Corbyn. Trying to force them to choose isn't going to help anyone.

Good posts gyac

Matt's right of course that the protesters were not some homogeneous mob but I think its good to consider the overall tone before you cast your lot in with arseholes who are not your political friends on most issues.

I wish they'd try to develop a coherent case for ignoring the first result - the backhanders and breaches of electoral law might amount to such a case, "thick meanies voted the wrong way" doesn't.

The best argument against it is the opacity of the funding for the Leave campaign, where the money come from, whether there was direct interference by Russia or elsewhere, the fact that campaign rules were broken anyway without much more than a slapped wrist, and the systematic spreading of disinformation as part of it. These are fundamental problems for any modern democracy and it's a huge can of worms even before you get into Britain's enviable historical record of interfering in other countries' democratic processes.

The argument isn't, or at least shouldn't be, about ignoring the result but allowing that the public get a vote on what the actual deal turns out to be, when we actually know what's on the table and what the consequences are likely to be. That is fundamentally democratic and you need to be able to make an honest and transparent case for it without muddying the water with '$top Brexshit' nonsense that means that half the electorate will just shut down and stop engaging.

Whether either of these things mean that the result would be any different is a moot point, and I'm not sure it should be the main concern.

Blair is the last person who should be speaking about this - besides the obvious reasons, he launched the 2005 campaign at the cliffs of Dover and had a slew of incredibly racist policies.

But what if the public votes for no deal?

xp

yeah, maybe the main concern should be how to fix a wrecked democracy - of course I'd argue it was always broken and this is a crisis born of its innate flaws - rather than who wins Stay/Leave in the short term. again, I'm very unsure that "your votes were meaningless" is a good base to start trying to repair the system from.

Or, more succinctly:

🐦[On today’s march, I ducked into Pret along with many other People’s Voters. It was heaving and chaotic, but we formed genteel queues, laughing - "No, no, after you -" "Do you mind if I just?" - because decent. Because cooperative. Because positive. Because properly British.
— Dominic Minghella (@DMinghella) October 20, 2018🕸]🐦

I enjoy it when people's class blinkers are so tightly strapped on they can't see them.

xp
The only difference being that the queue will be for rationed insect-meal and they will be all carrying bloodied lump hammers and axes :p

Fundamentally I'm just profoundly uncomfortable with arguments that boil down to "it's going to happen anyway, just accept it and move on", because those were exactly the arguments made to people who dissented to the post-Thatcherite economic consensus and look where we are now.

I enjoy when “decency” and “genteelness” are ascribed as somehow uniquely decent British values. At least everyone who died under the British Empire did it in a benign way?

Britain quashed the Mau Mau uprising in the tender and loving way one might put down a beloved family pet.

xp true but imo this has to go through Parliament and that can’t happen under the current circumstances. Remainers opposing the one party who can win under fptp are no better than people who “reluctantly” vote Tory in 2015 (and are probably some of the same people). Fundamentally though, none of these people are those at most risk from a catastrophic Brexit and their tonedeafness is dangerous.

i see yr points gyac and obv theres huge swathes of objectionables even on the desirable outcome side

but matts posts seem to make the most sense to me. in a winner-takes-all referendum on something as unsuited to exactly that then idk theres not afaict any scope at all for luxury in whom you happen to be campaigning alongside, and its p counterproductive to even nosehold whilst doing so.

get the result. you can disband immediately after, nobody will be locked in with blairites.

If it’s a choice between voting with the idiots or voting with the fascists, I’ll choose the well meaning idiots any day. That the same idiots are willing to throw immigrants/minorities/the poor under the bus in much the same way they did before the vote is the thing I’m objecting to.

dmac + matt youse are not factoring in what horrific forces can be unleashed by a good old fashioned Right Wing "stabbed in the back" narrative. I don't think I'm being ott here either.

That’s a worry but horrific forces are being unleashed whatever

No that's a central part of my thinking, it does play into their hands. But if you don't you let them win anyway.

If you're going to do that you have to take the fight to them and expose them for the frauds they are, which is why tone is so important and yet more jaunty metropolitanism is absolutely the wrong tone for that.

Then take the fight to them by actually making the argument for immigrants as people with real lives rather than units of destruction. Take the anti-establishment argument away by laying out how your approach will benefit the poor and stop paving the ground for a betrayal narrative. Take the fight to them by opposing the mainstreaming of fascism in the Times and the Telegraph. Leave won the emotional arguments, stop throwing facts and figures at it. Forge a narrative argument, not a technocratic one. Then you might be getting somewhere instead of laying the ground for an even heavier defeat and an even more extreme mandate.

I think Matt’s otm; I’ve been finding a certain type of People’s Voter voice extremely irritating in a similar way, I imagine, to a lot of the “trumps gonna get arrested” crowd, this fantasy of a reset button that gets us back to the glorious prelapsarian status quo of, um, 2016. That’s obviously bs but at the same time Brexit will still be all that bad shit plus yknow the total fucking trainwreck of Brexit, so I’m kinda coming around to the idea that averting it is something to aim for whatever the consequence (& I think there will be bad consequences) - just not *instead of* doing the work of offering something better

xp gyac otm

Everyone otm basically, except deems just because

i dont take it personally unless you pay extra

I agree that a 2nd ref would be incredibly risky. The only way it would work is if everyone who voted Remain plus a big chunk of the people who didn't vote last time came out and voted Remain. Because you can bet that practically all the people who voted Leave would vote Leave again. Really the only way that enough Leave voters might change their mind would be for the deal to be so bad that one of the prominent Leave campaigners publicly states that Leaving is a shit idea - and it would more or less have to be someone like Boris or Farage. Which is very unlikely to happen.

I suspect that, when the consequences are more tangible, you might simply get fewer leave voters turning out but idk. The grim reaper has probably swung things a bit too.

xp And even if it did happen and we somehow managed to stay in the EU we'd be a fucking pariah but so what's new?

."the grim reaper" is a bit harsh on Soubry, no need for personalised abuse!

the grim FBPEeper

Lol!