Brexit and British Member Of Parliament Murdered

[Paul Rigby]

Britain is not a rainy, fascist island here's my plan for ProgrExit

Paul Mason

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...xit-brexit

In the progressive half of British politics we need a plan to put our stamp on the Brexit result and fast.

We must prevent the Conservative right using the Brexit negotiations to reshape Britain into a rule-free space for corporations; we need to take control of the process whereby the rights of the citizen are redefined against those of a newly sovereign state.

Above all we need to provide certainty and solidarity to the millions of EU migrants who feel like the Brits threw them under a bus this week.

In short, we can and must fight to place social justice and democracy at the heart of the Brexit negotiations. I call this ProgrExit progressive exit. It can be done, but only if all the progressive parties of Britain set aside some of what divides them and unite around a common objective.

The position of Labour is pivotal. Only Labour can provide the framework of a government that could stop Boris Johnson, abetted by Nigel Farage, turning Britain into a Thatcherite free-market wasteland.

Labour and I mean here the 400,000 people with party cards and a meeting to go to must go beyond the analysis and grieving stage, and do something new.

First, Labour must clearly accept Brexit. There can be no second referendum, no legal sabotage effort. Labour has to become a party designed to deliver social justice outside the EU. It should, for the foreseeable future, abandon the objective of a return to EU membership. We are out, and must make the best of it.

Next, we should fight for an early election. Almost all parts of the Labour movement have reason to resist this: for the Blairites it holds the danger that Corbyn will become PM something they thought they had years to sabotage. For Corbyn, the nightmare is he gets stuck as a Labour prime minister with a Parliamentary Labour Party that does not support him. For the unions, they are out of cash. For the new breed of post-2015 activists, bruised by being told to eff off by what they assumed were their core supporters, it feels like a bad time to go back on the doorstep. But we must go there.

An early election I favour late November is the only democratic outcome in the present situation. No politician has a mandate to design a specific Brexit negotiation stance now. The only one with a democratic mandate to rule Britain just resigned, and his party's 2015 manifesto is junk.

Europe cannot conduct meaningful Brexit negotiations with a scratch-together rump Tory government. So the whole process will be on hold.

In the election Labour should offer an informal electoral pact to the Scottish National Party, Greens and Plaid Cymru. The aims should be a) defeating Ukip and b) preventing the formation of a Tory-Ukip-DUP government that would enact the ultra-right Brexit scenario.

Caroline Lucas has indicated the price of such a pact might be a commitment to proportional representation. Labour which cannot govern what is left of the UK alone, once Scotland leaves should accede to this.

If, as a result of the snap election, Labour can form a coalition government with the SNP, Plaid and Greens, it should do so.

However, the most obvious problem is the position of Scotland. Nicola Sturgeon is right to demand a new independence vote, and to explore how to time that vote in a way that maintains Scotland's continuous membership of the EU.

Given the strength of the remain vote in Scotland, Scottish Labour is faced with a big decision: does it oppose independence and go with Brexit to maintain the Union, or switch now to promoting independence to stay in the EU? I favour the latter, but it should be for Scottish Labour members to make that decision independently.

At Westminster, however, Labour should offer in return for a coalition government a no-penalty Scottish secession plan from the UK, funded and overseen by the Treasury and Bank of England.

Proportional representation, coalition government and Scottish independence were not in Labour's game plan at 10pm on Thursday night. But neither was Brexit.

If the political ideas in your head, cultivated over a lifetime, rebel against all this, you must get used to it: with or without the help of the PLP, Scotland is headed out of the UK. But Labour has the opportunity to make that separation amicable; it will be obligatory for all progressive parties to ally with the Scots as inevitably the authoritarians of Ukip try to prevent Sturgeon's second referendum.

As to what a Labour/SNP/Plaid and Green coalition would argue in the Brexit negotiations, the baseline has to be maintaining the existing progressive legislation on employment, consumer rights, women's rights, the environment etc. But at the same time a Labour-led Brexit negotiation would have to drive a hard bargain over ending bans on state aid, or on nationalisation.

If it were possible to conclude a deal within the European Economic Area I would favour that. But the baseline has to be a new policy on migration designed for the moment free movement ceases to apply. It should be humane, generous, and led by the needs of employers, local communities and universities and being an EU member should get you a lot of points.

But and this is the final mindset shift we in Labour must make free movement is over. Free movement was a core principle of the EU, developed over time. We are no longer part of that, and to reconnect with our voting base I don't mean the racists but the thousands of ordinary Labour voters, including black and Asian people we have to design a migration policy that works for them, and not for rip-off construction bosses or slavedrivers on the farms of East Anglia.

Britain is not, as the far left peevishly dubbed it, "rainy, fascist island": we've snatched glory from the jaws of ignominy in our history before now but only when politicians have shown vision.

If they don't show vision, we the rank and file of Labour, the left nationalists and the Greens who have way more in common than political labels suggest, should force them to unite and fight.

[Paul Rigby]

John Laughland in characteristically fine form:

[video=youtube_share;kgKIc0bobO4]http://youtu.be/kgKIc0bobO4[/video]

The US, the EU and the Spectre of Brexit

Alexander Mercouris

http://theduran.com/us-eu-spectre-brexit/

A spectre is haunting Europe the spectre Brexit. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Merkel and Hollande, Draghi and Juncker, French Socialists and German police-spies.

How did it happen? The answer lies not in England, which outside London voted heavily for Brexit. It lies within the EU itself.

I have been a strong supporter of the EU for nearly all my adult life. However I am not blind to the realities. It has been obvious to me for a long time that things have been going seriously wrong.

First it is important to dispel certain myths about the EU. In the popular Eurosceptic imagination it is a remote and unaccountable bureaucracy based in Brussels that meddles and regulates every area of life. This is a misrepresentation. The EU bureaucracy is actually rather small and has only as much power as EU governments give it.

John Laughland in a recent RT Crosstalk called the EU more accurately a cartel of governments who conspire behind the scenes with each other to pass legislation without the need to consult with their democratically elected parliaments. Whilst that is closer to the truth, it is not the whole truth. Rather the EU, at least as it has become over the last decade, is best understood as a cabal of three governments, primarily those of the US and Germany, with France treated by the Germans (though not by the US) as a sort of junior partner, which make the decisions in secret that are binding on all the rest.

I appreciate that this description of the EU will meet with strong objections in some quarters, especially as by far the most powerful of these governments is that of the US which is not a member of the EU. However what I say is well known by all the relevant insiders. Indeed the facts speak for themselves and are hardly even concealed. On key issues EU policy is nowadays decided in private bilateral discussions between the US and the Germans, often involving the US President and the German Chancellor, with the Germans then telling the other Europeans what they should do.

In a recent article for Sputnik I described the process as it is used in connection with the sanctions issue:

"……..a source has told me US representatives routinely attend the EU's Committee of Permanent Representatives ("COREPER"), though minutes of its sessions are edited to suppress the fact of their presence. However their regular attendance at sessions of a key institution of the EU of which the US is not a member state has been complained about on the floor of the European Parliament.

Since COREPER prepares the agenda for the EU's Council of Ministers (the EU's key law making body) and co-ordinates the work of some 250 EU committees and working parties in effect the entire EU bureaucracy US presence at its sessions gives the US a decisive voice in the making of EU policy.

Since the European Council decided to impose sectoral sanctions on Russia on 31st July 2014 every single decision to extend the sanctions has been taken not by the European Council but by COREPER, though COREPER's legal authority to make such decisions is questionable to say the least.

What happens in reality is that US President Obama tells German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Hollande to extend the sanctions, the Commission drafts the decision, COREPER ratifies it, and it is then published without further discussion on the Europa website.

Italian Prime Minister Renzi has complained German Chancellor Merkel talks about EU decisions to French President Hollande and EU Commission President Juncker. They are then announced, and it is only then he learns about them."

In the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote this procedure was at work again. The White House website confirms that apart from British Prime Minister Cameron the one EU leader US President Obama spoke to following the Brexit vote was German Chancellor Merkel as if it were Chancellor Merkel who headed the EU! The information the White House has released about the call shows it was intended to "reassure" Merkel and Cameron of the US's commitment to maintaining its partnership with the EU and Britain. Another way of putting it would be to say that it was intended to remind Merkel and Cameron of the US's paramount interest in the EU's and Britain's affairs and in preserving its alliance with both of them.

As I have explained in many places, any European political leader who tries to hold out against this system risks finding their objections simply ignored whilst becoming the target of the wrath of the US and of the EU establishment. Thus in January 2015, shortly after the Syriza government came to power in Greece, it found that it was supposed to have agreed to the rolling over of sanctions against certain Russian individuals and businesses. In fact it had done no such thing. However when it dared to make its concerns public its leaders were warned through the European media that they were being investigated by the West's intelligence agencies to see if they had Russian links. Faced by such a threat and caught up in difficult debt negotiations with the EU leadership, they caved in and the decision to roll over the sanctions was left to stand.

European leaders who object to the way things are now done in fact now run the risk of becoming the target of vicious smear campaigns in Europe's overwhelmingly Atlanticist mass media, as well as attempts to engineer their removal from office. Along the way they also risk having their countries become the target of harassment and sometimes outright destabilisation carried out through the EU's institutions. Thus Prime Ministers Berlusconi of Italy and Papandreou of Greece were ejected from office because they objected to aspects of the EU's economic policies during the Eurozone crisis and in Papandreou's case wanted to put an EU bailout proposal to the Greek people in a referendum; Prime Minister Tsipras of Greece experienced the illegal cutting off of credit to his country's banks and efforts which were ultimately successful to force him to reform his government in a more "acceptable" direction; and Prime Minister Orban of Hungary is regularly branded in parts of the European media a fascist because he has objected to certain EU policies and wants better relations with Russia.

Beyond these campaigns are repeated though usually veiled threats to cut off an EU member state's access to the EU structural funds or even to suspend its voting rights in the EU institutions if it refuses to toe the line. This is being currently done to Poland in relation to certain judicial changes that are being enacted there, it was done during the recent Austrian Presidential election in case the people of Austria voted the "wrong way", it was done last autumn to force various East European states to toe the EU line during the migrant crisis and it was done repeatedly to Greece during the Grexit crisis last year.

Most notorious of all is of course the EU's habit of simply ignoring the results of elections or referendums that go against its decisions. Most recently Greece and the Netherlands have conducted referendums on Greece's bailout and on the association agreement with Ukraine that were simply set aside or ignored.

In such a situation, where a political leader's chances of survival and ability to get things done depends so much on staying on the right side of the EU's leadership and ultimately of the US rather than their own country's voters, it is unsurprising that the quality of Europe's political leadership has declined to so great a degree. In place of people like De Gaulle, Adenauer, Brandt and Thatcher, European political leaders today increasingly come over as colourless technicians distant from their own voters because the system allows for nothing else.

Germany is no exception to this phenomenon. It is a fundamental mistake to see Germany as the beneficiary of the system. Far from Germany being the imperial master of the system as is often claimed, Germany actually finds itself in the unhappy position of being paymaster and enforcer for policies decided on in the US with its leader spied on to make sure she toes the line. The result is that Germany regularly gets blamed for policies that are actually decided elsewhere and which as in the case of the sanctions imposed on Russia are often contrary to its own interests.

Take the issue that more than any other crystallised anti-EU sentiment in Britain during the Brexit referendum: the EU's policy of unrestricted internal migration, which has resulted in large numbers of East European migrant workers coming to Britain.

Freedom of movement within the EU has always been a core principle of the EU. It was never an issue within the EU until the EU was expanded to include the much poorer countries of Eastern Europe. That expansion as everyone knows was driven not by European needs but first and foremost by US geopolitical strategies, being intended to anchor Eastern Europe in the US-led Western alliance system.

To that end the East European states were admitted into the EU long before their economic situations justified doing so. In order to seal the deal their elites were won over by promises of a seat at the EU top table. Huge sums were paid over to them principally by Germany through the so-called EU structural funds (originally conceived to foster development in the EU's poorer regions but increasingly used in Eastern and Southern Europe as a form of legalised bribery to bind local elites). Lastly, their young people were won over with the promise of visa free access to the rest of Europe thus creating the migrant situation that has been the cause of so much anger in Britain.

The implications were never thought through or discussed within Europe because EU expansion ultimately followed a US geopolitical agenda rather than a European one. The result is that despite increasing alarm across Europe at the consequences of the policy the EU bureaucracy continues to pursue the same policy towards other states the US wants to bring into the system like Turkey and Ukraine.

Or take another issue: the Eurozone crisis. The idea of European monetary union was originally conceived in the 1970s and was already firmly on the agenda by the late 1980s. Margaret Thatcher fell from power because she opposed it. The idea it was conceived following the fall of the Berlin Wall is wrong.

What has made the Eurozone crisis so intractable is its well-known structural problems the fact a single currency was created to cover very different economies without a single treasury or tax system behind it but also the contradiction between the US geopolitical ambitions that increasingly drive the EU and European needs if the Eurozone is to be managed properly.

Economic conditions in southern Europe in Greece especially point clearly to the need for at least some of these countries to exit the Eurozone, a fact that is well-understood within the German government. Yet that option is ruled out not just because of opposition within Europe itself but because again it goes against the geopolitical interest of the US, which is to keep these countries locked within the euro system, which in turn binds them to the Western alliance and therefore ultimately to the US itself. Thus at the height of the Grexit crisis last year German Chancellor Merkel abruptly reversed a previously agreed German position to support Grexit following a call from President Obama of the US who told her not to. The result is that instead of the Greek crisis being resolved once and for all in Europe's and Greece's interests as German Finance Minister Schauble said it should be it has instead been left to fester indefinitely.

The EU can work as it did in the past when it functions as a genuine community of economically and culturally compatible free democracies, which do not always agree with each other but which are nonetheless prepared to work closely with each other in certain areas in their mutual interest.

It cannot work as a crypto-imperial project of someone else especially when that someone else is located far away on the other side of the ocean and can therefore have little idea of European wants and needs.

It was therefore inevitable that beyond a certain point such a crypto-imperial project would provoke resistance and it is entirely unsurprising that the first expression of that resistance should come in Britain, which has always been the country that was most skeptical of the EU in the first place.

In truth Britain has for some time now operated in an anomalous position within the EU. As Wolfgang Munchau has rightly said in an article in the Financial Times, Britain has in reality been at best a semi-detached member of the EU for some time, remaining in theory a member of the EU but refusing to commit itself to the Eurozone where the key decisions are now made.

Britain is not therefore a key member of the EU and Brexit is not the catalyst for a wider revolt within the EU that some say it is. Rather it is a harbinger of more revolts to come, which were already on the way, and which without a radical change of approach would in time happen irrespective of whether there were a Brexit vote or not. Already there are stirrings in Spain, Italy and France and increasingly even in Germany itself.

The EU leaders still have the time and political space to turn things round. Doing so however will require a degree of courage, intelligence and political imagination that in recent years has been in disastrously short supply. Above all what is needed is a renegotiation of Europe's relationship with the US, changing it from a relationship of subservience into one of genuine equality and partnership.

The alternative is probably not the imminent disintegration of the EU. The economic and political bonds that hold it together make that unlikely. Rather it is one of an EU wracked by disagreement and crisis, with its population increasingly sullen and disaffected, and with its economy going nowhere.

In some respects that would be an even worse outcome and betrayal of the people of Europe than the EU's disintegration, which would at least offer the possibility of a fresh start. As a European I devoutly hope it will not come to that. As a realist I have no conviction that it won't.

[David Guyatt]

My sense is that the political elite now won't trigger Clause 50 to leave the EU, but intend - and perhaps always intended anyway - to use the Brexit vote (should it have come to that, which it has) to renegotiate new terms. I hope I'm wrong... but. Should it pan out this way then democracy is truly fucked and finished in the UK - as all main political parties will do what they want not what they're told to do by the voters.

[Drew Phipps]

Perhaps it was too early to make that Hadrian's Wall joke. I did not mean to offend. I should have read my history more carefully. "Britain" was the name coined after Scotland and England joined. So, I am supposing that if Scotland leaves, it will be "England" once again..?"


We don't have national referendums, or votes of "no confidence" in the USA (that I know of, perhaps we need them, instead of polls). I suppose that a national referendum on specific issues might produce unexpected consensus, similar to the Brexit vote (like that the majority of Americans have lost confidence in Congress, our parliament). As it is, the two party system, and the "urgent" need to prevent the "other party" from assuming control of one or more branches of government, has truly and shamefully kept Congress from doing the necessary business of legislating for the common good.

[Magda Hassan]

Perhaps it was too early to make that Hadrian's Wall joke. I did not mean to offend. I should have read my history more carefully. "Britain" was the name coined after Scotland and England joined. So, I am supposing that if Scotland leaves, it will be "England" once again..?

The Irish are leaving too. Even McGuiness has offered Paisley an Irish passport if he needs it. It will just be little Britain and maybe Wales which is left.

[Peter Lemkin]

My sense is that the political elite now won't trigger Clause 50 to leave the EU, but intend - and perhaps always intended anyway - to use the Brexit vote (should it have come to that, which it has) to renegotiate new terms. I hope I'm wrong... but. Should it pan out this way then democracy is truly fucked and finished in the UK - as all main political parties will do what they want not what they're told to do by the voters.

They are not legally bound to act in a manner consistent with the recent advisory vote....it was just a sense of the People and if they want to ignore the People, they can; however, the consequences could tear the country apart - literally and politically. With BOTH major political parties there now imploding it seems none were prepared for what happened, and are making decisions on the fly now......::knight::

[Drew Phipps]

Here's an article about relocating Britain's nuclear armed submarines in the wake of potential Scottish independence, from 2014.


https://www.rt.com/uk/180248-trident-nuc...-scotland/


I wouldn't imagine many nukes are stationed in Ireland.

[Magda Hassan]

Scotland has all the oil too. And free tuition. And a different NHS.
England has all the Tories. And no industries much any more. And lots of unemployment.
They should decommission all the Tridents. Can't afford them in all senses of the word.

[Peter Lemkin]

The entire UK elites seem to be imploding - I don't think either side was really prepared for this result.........::

[David Guyatt]

Peter Hitchens has written a corker of an article on the entire mess that basically calls for a new party to form so the other outdated parties can just fuck off and die. And since they only ever represent themselves that what they should do. HERE.

The UK, in whatever shape it ends up, cannot afford a nuclear deterrent and shouldn't have one anyway. What's the point when it requires launch keys that are held by America. We can't launch a sparrow without their approval and say so, therefore it's just for show and to make various people wealthy.

We're a tiny nation and I would much prefer it if we went the way of Iceland which is now truly democratic. The UK needs now to scale back a lot and stop pretending to be something it's not and face the realities that are pressing against the window. It needs to unsubscribe from the Five Eyes in order to diminish and then cease US control over our political elite and military and intelligence apparatus and, instead, we should start building trading bridges with whoever we can on an equitable and fair - and most of all - on an open and transparent basis. The whole "we are a great nation" bollocks is 100 years past and has only be kept alive like a revenant from regular infusions of the nations ever diminishing treasure. In the last analysis it has only ever been used to sustain the egos of the political and Mandarin class so they can swan around thinking they have big, rather than tiny male appendages.

Let the City bankers bugger off to Berlin and explode on Bratwurst. All they do is manipulate No. 10 and Parliament and drain the nation resources whenever they need rescuing anyway.