brexit negging when yr mandate is is trash: or further chronicles of a garbage-fire

Well yeah, he is only disseminating that type of borderline Nazi thought that they keep hearing out there on the doorsteps.

This is great from the FT today. It's paywalled so I'll paste it:

Brexit
Brexit is Britain’s gift to the world
‘The UK is now experimenting on itself for the benefit of humanity’

September 21, 2017 4:01 am by Simon Kuper

The British chemist Sir Humphry Davy (born 1778) liked dangerous experiments. He was fired from his job as an apothecary for causing constant explosions. Later, as a chemist, he enjoyed inhaling the gases he worked with. This helped him discover that nitrous oxide (laughing gas) was a potent anaesthetic. “Unfortunately,” notes a short guide to his career from Oxford University Press, “the same habit led him to nearly kill himself on many occasions and the frequent poisonings left him an invalid for the last two decades of his life.” It was probably worth it: Davy isolated substances including calcium and strontium, identified the element iodine and made the first electric light.

Much like Davy, the UK is now experimenting on itself for the benefit of humanity. Advanced societies rarely do anything so reckless, which is why the Brexit experiment is so valuable. In between self-poisonings, Brexit keeps producing discoveries that surprise both Leavers and Remainers. Here are some early lessons for other countries:
When you focus on a wedge issue, you divide society. The Brexit vote has introduced unprecedented rancour into a traditionally apolitical country. Insults such as “enemies of the people”, “saboteurs”, “racists” and “go home to where you came from” are now daily British fare. Brexit rows split generations at family weddings and Christmas. All this was avoidable: until the referendum, few Britons had strong views on the EU, just as few Americans thought about transgender bathroom habits until their politicians discovered the issue. If you have to address wedge issues, best to aim for compromise rather than a winner-take-all solution such as a referendum.

All countries need real-time election regulators. There have always been people who lied to win votes. But now they have social media. Every slow, understaffed, 20th-century election regulator must therefore retool itself into a kind of courtroom judge who can call out falsehoods instantly. The model is the UK Statistics Authority’s reprimand of Boris Johnson last Sunday, after he repeated the nonsense that leaving the EU would free up £350m a week for the National Health Service.
Revolutionaries invariably underestimate transition costs. Maybe if you have a blank slate, being out of the EU is better than being in it. But the calculation changes once you’ve been in the EU for 43 years. All your arrangements are then predicated on being in, and suddenly they become redundant. The cost of change is a classic conservative insight, though it’s been forgotten by the Conservative party.

Almost every system is more complex than it looks. Most people can’t describe the workings of a toilet, writes Steven Sloman, cognitive scientist at Brown University. The EU is even more complicated, and so leaving it has countless unforeseen ramifications. Most Britons had no idea last year that voting Leave could mean closing the Irish border, or giving ministers dictatorial powers to rewrite law. Because of complexity, so-called common sense is a bad guide to policy making. Complexity is also an argument against direct democracy.

Immigrants fulfil a role. Any society in which they live comes to depend on them. Britain’s NHS and the City of London would buckle without them. You may calculate that your distaste for immigrants is worth some lost functioning, but you have to acknowledge the trade-off.

You have to choose who to surrender your sovereignty to. Brexiters are right to say that the EU has usurped some of British sovereignty. But as John Major, former British prime minister, remarks, in a connected world the only fully sovereign state is North Korea. All other countries are forever trading away bits of sovereignty. For instance, the trade deal that the UK hopes to sign one day with the EU will entail adopting the EU’s standards on everything from cars to toys. You can decide to give away your sovereignty in new ways but, in practice, you can’t decide to keep it.

A government can only handle one massive project at a time. This is at best, and only if the whole government agrees on it. There simply isn’t the staff or head space to do much more. Carrying out Brexit means not fixing what Johnson in February 2016 called “the real problems of this country — low skills, low social mobility, low investment etc — that have nothing to do with Europe”. (See my colleague Martin Sandbu’s recent demolition of Johnson’s inconsistencies.)

Negotiations get harder when you lose your counter-party’s trust. That’s what Greece discovered during its negotiations with the EU, says Greek economic analyst Paris Mantzavras of Pantelakis Securities. Mocking the other side in public — as Greece’s Yanis Varoufakis did, and as British politicians now do regularly — is therefore a losing tactic.

There is no reset button in human affairs. The UK cannot return to its imagined pre-EU idyll, because the world has changed since 1973. Nor can Britons simply discard the Brexit experiment if it goes wrong, and revert to June 22 2016. The past is over, so it’s a poor guide to policymaking.
These lessons come too late for the UK itself, so please consider them our selfless gift to the world, like football.

si✧✧✧.ku✧✧✧@f✧.c✧✧ @KuperSimon

They might be correct that Brexit will fuck up the economy. But fuck the FT forever!

"Most people can’t describe the workings of a toilet"

Very complicated: a combination of water pressure, gravity and shit rolling downhill!

To make it more trenchant. I should have added... oh forget it!

A government can only handle one massive project at a time.

speak for yourselves yo

Simon Kuper doesn't seem to be a typical FT staff columnist. he's mostly into football and being the token liberal

"he's mostly into football and being the token liberal"

well if that had of been in his byline, I'd have judged his work completely differently ;)

Most Britons had no idea last year that voting Leave could mean closing the Irish border, or giving ministers dictatorial powers to rewrite law.

No, most Britons (whether by voting Leave or not voting at all) just didn't give a shit.

not sure that any british politicians had given it any thought either, if the panicked flapping that ensued over the issue right after the referendum is anything to go by

that's true, tho I think he ham-fistedly kind of tried to make that point - "this thing became an issue because it was politically forced to become an issue". I used to make the same point to my dad - if most voters cared that much about the EU, UKIP wd've had a stack of MPs a decade ago. referendums distort opinions.

the stuff he writes about the innate problems of representative democracies is interesting because true, wilfully ignored and maybe unsolveable. "our" system and "our" values are built on an underlying apathy and willingness to be ruled, as long as we maintain the veneer of representation. and maybe there's no other way to run modern states at this level of complexity. the difference between parliamentary democracy and Augustus's Rome looks fairly trivial to me.

wonder if the food was better in augustus' rome

I'm sure it was all organic

it was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edible_dormouse#Cuisine

and they used every part of the dormouse

Long-lost Roman flavours:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170907-the-mystery-of-the-lost-roman-herb

Apathy and willingness to be ruled need to be backed, at least to some extent, by a trust that the leaders have some idea of what they're doing.

I'm not sure lying quite covers it. People expect to be lied to by politicians but they have also, again to some extent, expect those lies to be backed by an underlying competence. Lose that perception of competence, as Labour did in the 70s and 00s and the Tories did in the 90s and you are punished.

The global crash and wider period of wage stagnation, in combination with the perception that the developing world is going to take a bigger share of a finite pie, has massively undermined that though. Rather than being seen as useless, which get you turfed out and replaced, the role of the government is increasingly seen as almost irrelevant. The economy governs itself.

I think that's partly why 'cultural' / racial issues have come back to the forefront, why people were willing to choose a loose cannon businessman over a career politician in the US, why the Tory attacks on Corbyn's economic competence failed to land in the way they expected, etc.

That combination of a belief that the economy will be bad / fine whatever political decisions are made and the vague notion of wanting to regain some kind of control over the world (not necessarily even in the context of the EU) probably drove the referendum outcome in part as well.

I don't think people have the ability to evaluate relative competence anymore, or have given up trying. Thus.

it's very difficult to assess competence that appears to be functioning against your own best interests, for one thing

"trust these people, they know what they're doing" is not comforting if you feel your socioeconomic status is low or lowering

how many people distrust doctors ffs?

When I was at university there was a dormouse and ouzo night, for the classics. Obviously I wouldn't eat it now, but I don't remember it being very interesting. Vinegary chicken? (I think it was pickled).

how many people distrust doctors ffs?

...lots and lots?

Is what I mean, Tom. People have no faith in professionals who are obviously more competent to manage them than they are themselves, so this is magnified a lot in a field like "politics" which might appear to require no more qualification to do than common sense and some degree of probity

So if voters, for example, were more deferent to power in years gone by I don't think it was because they were better judges of competence, but perhaps in a pre-media saturated age they felt less confident in their own judgements. And that's right because people are spectacularly poor at judging competence in unfamiliar fields

Ah ok. re-reading I think you and I and SV are all in agreement then.

Leaving aside the issue of ability, i'd be fascinated to see the relative answers now and, say, 40 years ago, to the question "what do politicians do? / what are politicians for?".

Meanwhile, Scottish Labour still bringing the LOLz

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/09/21/nicola-sturgeon-savages-scottish-labour-leadership-candidate/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2017/09/21/TELEMMGLPICT000141306166_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqJkOOPTgCoBwVWEG7Yu7ksY0ntdn-aJE3snPer6qk6X0.jpeg

Face is trippin' him, so it is.

I think politicians themselves are more disillusioned, cynical and pessimistic about politics too. I remember seeing Harriet Harman debating in the run up to the Indyref saying sympathising plainly with audience members and saying how poor parliament was, in a way that was quite surprising to hear from such a senior front line politician

Lol! Sarwar's leadership campaign is going to be a lot of fun. He almost makes Dugdale seem left of centre, so much ammo for his detractors !

Oh nooooooo save Uber oh noooooo

Good grief

Lol! Sarwar's leadership campaign is going to be a lot of fun. He almost makes Dugdale seem left of centre, so much ammo for his detractors !

― calzino, Friday, September 22, 2017 8:53 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

literally every issue that has came up to bite him on the arse was entirely predictable, the fact that he has even bothered his arse to run despite the fact that his personal circumstances will disqualify him in the eyes of the majority of the scottish labour membership/scottish public shows that his naked ambition exceeds his common sense.

To be honest, I thought the previous day in Scottish politics was funnier. The SNP abstained from a vote on whether the parliament should have an opinion on income tax.

xp
Sarwar apparently showed some integrity over Iraq, but otherwise he has the full set of unreconstructed Tory cards!

We've been preparing for the two main outcomes of brexit for far longer and with considerably greater alacrity than the govt who brought it about, I think.

We'll still fuck it up tho.

Russell Brand is a Steve coogan character yes

Russell Brand is the proof that people should be discouraged a lot more.

Penny Mordaunt (shit) is on Any Questions now. We just received a parliamentary letter from our local MP Paula Sherriff, in which She pledged to personally press Mordaunt on my partner's PIP claim. Not hearing lots of feelgood stories about local MP's getting decisions overturned though.

russell brand is one of those troubling characters whose views are not a million miles from my own but is such a dickhead that i start to wonder if i'm actually in the wrong

i think russell brand knows he's a dickhead at least. that doesn't excuse his behaviour but i can sympathise a bit more this way. also he's friends with simon amstell, in a sort of weird inner-essex depressive extrovert team

oh, I notice he is plugging a coming-of-age memoir. How absolutely unique.

Amstell that is, the other fool has a book out as well!

aw, amstell's great

tbh, I only know him as a presenter of that show I studiously avoided.

his vegan propaganda movie from this year is worth seeing. made me feel much, much more ashamed than, say, cowspiracy. also it was funny

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/09/the-uber-ban-is-a-pitiful-howl-against-a-changing-economy/

^ state of this

Russell Brand, Russell Brand.

I don't think he's ever going to be someone that we turn to for bold new insights like but I do like watching someone learn and engage with ideas in public, considering I usually keep schtum or do small talk if there are members of the public around, like I was sat in a cafe just after the Brexit vote and I saw my mate and we were consoling each other a bit and the cafe lady came out and said she agreed with the Brexit and I couldn't find whatever it is that chipper people have that lets them do chummy debates in public

Whereas he's put out a youtube video of him reading Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism

I feel like he'd have been able to have a productive conversation with the cafe lady?

The cafe closed down two weeks later

With a lot of other comedian celebrity hybrids when they do their lefty bit it's usually patronising, pretending they're stupider and zanier than they really are, whereas with him he really is zany and stupid but none the less seems to have accepted as fact that the state we're in is a fucking nightmare so?

Building an economy for the many also means bringing ownership and control of the utilities and key services into the hands of people who use and work in them. Rail, water, energy, Royal Mail- we’re taking them back.

*tears of joy*

oddly, the BBC don't seem to like the idea of PFI's being brought "in-house" and I keep hearing: b.b.b. but what about the shareholders.

^ Really good to hear this. Just going for it for once.

I mean "odd" about the bbc as in hypocritical really, in that privatisation is their own worst nightmare - yet they don't care how ruinous it has been to our NHS + Railway networks etc

The BBC has been part privatized for years - can't remember the exact percentage of programming that it's obliged to commission from external producers but it's significant

So which part of it justifies the license fee? I wouldn't complain about paying a much reduced radio license, political bias and all. But I barely watch anything on the BBC tv these days.