sadmanbarty

Well-known member

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Jonathan Portes honestly attempts to reconcile access to the single market and limiting EU immigration:

http://www.niesr.ac.uk/blog/eea-minus-option-amending-not-ending-free-movement#.V3lvMpMrJfQ

There's still the fundamental question of whether voters would choose this over remaining in the EU if those were the options. I can't see it myself, bearing in mind this:

"two-thirds (68%) saying that they would not being happy to pay any of their own personal annual income to tighten the control Britain has over immigration and reduce the number of EU migrants entering the UK."

http://www.comres.co.uk/polls/sun-eu-referendum-poll-june-2016/
 

luka

Well-known member
Nobody from either in or out camp is even talking about the biggest buildup of military on Russian borers since Ger many attacked in WW2. Everybody knows that US was behind Ukraine violent coup, all that Crimea did was to exercise it's right to self determination. Ne never had any problems with Falkland Islands referendum, Scottish and now the UK referendum. Kosovo separated from Serbia without refrendum, no problem. Crimea on the other hand... Before voting I never even considered financial implication. I don't care how much it is going g cost me but the EU subservience to the US imperialism must stop. EU is NATO's political wi g. This madness must come to an end. Now we have leaked emails from retired NATO general lying through his teeth to drag Russia into a war! This is definition of insanity! EU deliberately stabbed it's own electorate and business in the back when it introduced sanctions against st Russia. Now they are talking about cenralized taxation system and military. They have lost the plot. They are completely out of control. Good riddance.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member

“A majority of the electorate, in a high turnout had specifically endorse a policy rejected and indeed sneered at for decades by… the BBC”

This would suggest that is not true:

some interviewers were quite well-informed, but still held back from correcting Leavers when they made untrue statements. As an institution, the BBC was terrified of being thought of as pro-EU – partly because of the sheer volume of complaints it receives from hard-line Outers. So the BBC bent over backwards not to behave in ways that could be construed as biased against Leave. One of the BBC’s most senior journalists confessed to me, a few days before the referendum: “If we give a Leaver a hard time, we know that the Mail or the Sun may pick on us and that that is bad for our careers. But if we are tough on Remainers it might upset the Guardian and that doesn’t matter at all. This affects the way some colleagues handle interviews.”

http://www.cer.org.uk/insights/how-leave-outgunned-remain-battle-five-ms
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Luka, some of thoughts/ questions about your post:

Russian border build up

Will Britain leaving the EU, or even the collapse of the EU, end NATO’s eastward expansion?

The north European plane has little in the way of natural boundaries, so it is very easy to move ground troops along it, so countries feel they need buffers. This ping pong of ground troops has been going on for hundreds of years, it is the result of geography rather than the current political situation.

If anything, the EU neutralises Germany militarily, meaning that it won’t repeat its actions during the world wars.

Crimea

Would you agree that a just solution to the conflict in Northern Ireland required that the interests of both the unionists and republicans were addressed? Does the same principle apply to Crimea with regards to the various ethnic groups?


Subservience to the US

Remember both france and Germany (2 of the 3 most influential EU members) opposed the Iraq war.

EU countries were hugely important in negotiating with Iran, instead of going to war.

Will Britain leaving the EU, or even the collapse of the EU, end this subservience?

Doesn’t a stronger EU mean that it has more leverage to differ from US policy (such as labeling goods from Israeli settlements)?

Centralised army

This is not going to happen.
 

luka

Well-known member
Luka, some of thoughts/ questions about your post:

Russian border build up

Will Britain leaving the EU, or even the collapse of the EU, end NATO’s eastward expansion?

The north European plane has little in the way of natural boundaries, so it is very easy to move ground troops along it, so countries feel they need buffers. This ping pong of ground troops has been going on for hundreds of years, it is the result of geography rather than the current political situation.

If anything, the EU neutralises Germany militarily, meaning that it won’t repeat its actions during the world wars.

Crimea

Would you agree that a just solution to the conflict in Northern Ireland required that the interests of both the unionists and republicans were addressed? Does the same principle apply to Crimea with regards to the various ethnic groups?


Subservience to the US

Remember both france and Germany (2 of the 3 most influential EU members) opposed the Iraq war.

EU countries were hugely important in negotiating with Iran, instead of going to war.

Will Britain leaving the EU, or even the collapse of the EU, end this subservience?

Doesn’t a stronger EU mean that it has more leverage to differ from US policy (such as labeling goods from Israeli settlements)?

Centralised army

This is not going to happen.

It was just a cut and paste job from the Guardian comments.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I'm a supporter of Corbyn, but does this boost in membership prove that he is electable by the country at large, or that those who DO like him REALLY like him? I would be gutted to think that somebody with genuine principles ISN'T electable in this country.

Are polls like this just establishment fear mongering? http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/...larity_12_point_boost__according_to_new_poll/

(About to be informed that the Scottish Herald is about as credible as The Star)
 

droid

Well-known member
The headline doesn't match the findings for one thing, but TBH, the British media has been so monolithically opposed and distorted in their coverage of Corbyn I find it hard to believe anything I read - the guardian's Islamic state 'misquote' least week being the most egregious recent example
 

vimothy

yurp
[The Rise of the Meritocracy] was a satire meant to be a warning (which needless to say has not been heeded) against what might happen to Britain...

Underpinning my argument was a non-controversial historical analysis of what had been happening to society for more than a century before 1958, and most emphatically since the 1870s, when schooling was made compulsory and competitive entry to the civil service became the rule.

Until that time status was generally ascribed by birth. But irrespective of people's birth, status has gradually become more achievable.

It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others.

Ability of a conventional kind, which used to be distributed between the classes more or less at random, has become much more highly concentrated by the engine of education.

A social revolution has been accomplished by harnessing schools and universities to the task of sieving people according to education's narrow band of values.

With an amazing battery of certificates and degrees at its disposal, education has put its seal of approval on a minority, and its seal of disapproval on the many who fail to shine from the time they are relegated to the bottom streams at the age of seven or before.

The new class has the means at hand, and largely under its control, by which it reproduces itself.

The more controversial prediction and the warning followed from the historical analysis. I expected that the poor and the disadvantaged would be done down, and in fact they have been. If branded at school they are more vulnerable for later unemployment.

They can easily become demoralised by being looked down on so woundingly by people who have done well for themselves.

It is hard indeed in a society that makes so much of merit to be judged as having none. No underclass has ever been left as morally naked as that.

They have been deprived by educational selection of many of those who would have been their natural leaders, the able spokesmen and spokeswomen from the working class who continued to identify with the class from which they came.

(...)

With the coming of the meritocracy, the now leaderless masses were partially disfranchised; as time has gone by, more and more of them have been disengaged, and disaffected to the extent of not even bothering to vote. They no longer have their own people to represent them.

To make the point it is worth comparing the Attlee and Blair cabinets. The two most influential members of the 1945 cabinet were Ernest Bevin, acclaimed as foreign secretary, and Herbert Morrison, acclaimed as lord president of the council and deputy prime minister.

Bevin left school at 11 to take a job as a farm boy, and was subsequently a kitchen boy, a grocer's errand boy, a van boy, a tram conductor and a drayman before, at the age of 29, he became active locally in Bristol in the Dock Wharf, Riverside and General Labourers' union.

Herbert Morrison was in many ways an even more significant figure, whose rise to prominence was not so much through the unions as through local government.

His first job was also as an errand boy and assistant in a grocer's shop, from which he moved on to be a junior shop assistant and an early switchboard operator. He later became so influential as leader of the London county council partly because of his previous success as minister of transport in the 1929 Labour government.

(...)

It is a sharp contrast with the Blair cabinet, largely filled as it is with members of the meritocracy.

In the new social environment, the rich and the powerful have been doing mighty well for themselves. They have been freed from the old kinds of criticism from people who had to be listened to. This once helped keep them in check - it has been the opposite under the Blair government.

The business meritocracy is in vogue. If meritocrats believe, as more and more of them are encouraged to, that their advancement comes from their own merits, they can feel they deserve whatever they can get.

They can be insufferably smug, much more so than the people who knew they had achieved advancement not on their own merit but because they were, as somebody's son or daughter, the beneficiaries of nepotism. The newcomers can actually believe they have morality on their side.

Michael Young, "Down with meritocracy", June 2001

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
The idea that neither Johnson nor Gove would end up profiting from a Brexit vote, and indeed that it would sideline them both as political forces..the last month has been pretty extraordinary.

At least the sociopathic rightwinger who heads up the UK government will have female genitalia, so that's an upside.

Leadsom's recipe for a perfect British society: “Take one cup of Anglo Saxon determination; mix with a jugful of Muslim respect for the family; stir in a pinch of traditional Asian modesty; whisk with two tablespoonsful of military respect for authority; serve on a bed of East European work ethic.”
Having read some more of her blog posts, she is terrifying. Absolutely crazy, but with some ideas that are bizarre right wing twists on thinking that is actually quite progressive (eg recognising the existence of early trauma and its contribution to issues in later life - "It's my view that our society is paying the price of a cycle of misery passed down the generations" - which I could never imagine Cameron doing in a million years. But then suggesting the use of this knowledge to discriminate and oppress.). She is a seriously odd person, in a way that seems scary in a v different way to the Theresa Mays of this world.
 
Last edited:

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
At least the sociopathic rightwinger who heads up the UK government will have female genitalia, so that's an upside.

Sorry if you're being ironic here and I've missed the joke, but I can't see anything to celebrate even in this, in and of itself. I mean, were the '80s a golden age for women's rights in this country just because Thatcher was in charge? I rather get the impression that any progress made in that direction happened despite her, not because of her.

If anything, having a woman lead such a right-wing government could even be counter-productive from the POV of progressive politics, as it could allow the Tories to claim some sort of feminist credentials they don't remotely warrant. A bit like how some white Americans seem to think racism is "solved" because there's been a dark-skinned man in the Oval Office (or, more ridiculously still, that it's "swung back the other way" and it's now whites who are horribly oppressed and persecuted).

Not that I'm saying Obama's presidency hasn't been (in some respects) a good thing or that it shouldn't have happened - far from it - just that we shouldn't kid ourselves about how much progress has actually happened just because there is or has been a mixed-race PotUS or a female PM.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
definitely being ironic! I was kinda nodding to all those commentating on the US election who say that the mere presence of a woman in the Oval Office will be a victory for all women, regardless of the record/views/identity of the person involved (and the assumption that a female PM/president will even be sensitive to the rights/interests of other women, let alone those facing other forms of discrimination, e.g. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/01/hillary-clinton-president-my-turn-feminism-welfare-reform-haiti/)
 
Last edited:

trza

Well-known member
So a person named Doug, writing for Jacobin magazine, is the final arbiter of feminism and female progress?
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
@trza:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julia-sharpelevine/why-hillary-clinton-is-in_b_9720154.html

Do you have a non-point-scoring comment in store for us? i.e. stop making straw men/women so you can be self-righteous. We all do that from time to time, though.

Rania Khalek: http://fair.org/extra/hillary-clinton-and-the-feminism-of-exclusion/
Belen Fernandez: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2016/03/hillary-clinton-faux-feminism-160328105225310.html

Who is the ultimate arbiter of feminism and female progress, by the way?
 
Last edited:
Top