Brexit and British Member Of Parliament Murdered

[Magda Hassan]

Of course this means the EU arrest warrant for Julian Assange is no longer valid. This may be some explanation for Sweden wanting to speak with Assange at embassy after all these years.

[Peter Lemkin]

Of course this means the EU arrest warrant for Julian Assange is no longer valid. This may be some explanation for Sweden wanting to speak with Assange at embassy after all these years.

The EU arrest warrant may be valid until the UK formally leaves...I don't know and it may be a contested legal issue...but anyway, I know an Interpol arrest warrant cares not if one is EU or not......but, it may have, as you say, something to do with the sudden interest as special inter-EU legal mechanisms now may not be able to be utilized; but they were psychic to foresee the election result.

[Magda Hassan]

Of course this means the EU arrest warrant for Julian Assange is no longer valid. This may be some explanation for Sweden wanting to speak with Assange at embassy after all these years.

The EU arrest warrant may be valid until the UK formally leaves...I don't know and it may be a contested legal issue...but anyway, I know an Interpol arrest warrant cares not if one is EU or not......but, it may have, as you say, something to do with the sudden interest...but they were psychic to foresee the election.

Yes, I expect it to valid until the UK is formally out of the EU.

[Drew Phipps]

So the Brits might have to man Hadrian's Wall again?

[Paul Rigby]

So the Brits might have to man Hadrian's Wall again?

Wode betide us! You mean the English, Drew. In any case, after centuries of close proximity, inter-marriage, & shared bibulousness, we know what's under their kilts - an enormous demand for money. Thank God we're skint.

[Paul Rigby]

John Laughland in characteristically fine form:

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

[Paul Rigby]

JUNE 24, 2016

A Blow for Peace and Democracy: Why the British Said No to Europe

by JOHN PILGER

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/24/a...to-europe/

The majority vote by Britons to leave the European Union was an act of raw democracy. Millions of ordinary people refused to be bullied, intimidated and dismissed with open contempt by their presumed betters in the major parties, the leaders of the business and banking oligarchy and the media.

This was, in great part, a vote by those angered and demoralised by the sheer arrogance of the apologists for the "Remain" campaign and the dismemberment of a socially just civil life in Britain. The last bastion of the historic reforms of 1945, the National Health Service, has been so subverted by Tory and Labour-supported privateers it is fighting for its life.

A forewarning came when the Treasurer, George Osborne, the embodiment of both Britain's ancient regime and the banking mafia in Europe, threatened to cut £30 billion from public services if people voted the wrong way; it was blackmail on a shocking scale.

Immigration was exploited in the campaign with consummate cynicism, not only by populist politicians from the lunar right, but by Labour politicians drawing on their own venerable tradition of promoting and nurturing racism, a symptom of corruption not at the bottom but at the top. The reason millions of refugees have fled the Middle East first Iraq, now Syria are the invasions and imperial mayhem of Britain, the United States, France, the European Union and Nato. Before that, there was the wilful destruction of Yugoslavia. Before that, there was the theft of Palestine and the imposition of Israel.

The pith helmets may have long gone, but the blood has never dried. A nineteenth century contempt for countries and peoples, depending on their degree of colonial usefulness, remains a centrepiece of modern "globalisation", with its perverse socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor: its freedom for capital and denial of freedom to labour; its perfidious politicians and politicised civil servants.

All this has now come home to Europe, enriching the likes of Tony Blair and impoverishing and disempowering millions. On 23 June, the British said no more.

The most effective propagandists of the "European ideal" have not been the far right, but an insufferably patrician class for whom metropolitan London is the United Kingdom. Its leading members see themselves as liberal, enlightened, cultivated tribunes of the 21st century zeitgeist, even "cool". What they really are is a bourgeoisie with insatiable consumerist tastes and ancient instincts of their own superiority. In their house paper, the Guardian, they have gloated, day after day, at those who would even consider the EU profoundly undemocratic, a source of social injustice and a virulent extremism known as "neoliberalism".

The aim of this extremism is to install a permanent, capitalist theocracy that ensures a two-thirds society, with the majority divided and indebted, managed by a corporate class, and a permanent working poor. In Britain today, 63 per cent of poor children grow up in families where one member is working. For them, the trap has closed. More than 600,000 residents of Britain's second city, Greater Manchester, are, reports a study, "experiencing the effects of extreme poverty" and 1.6 million are slipping into penury.

Little of this social catastrophe is acknowledged in the bourgeois controlled media, notably the Oxbridge dominated BBC. During the referendum campaign, almost no insightful analysis was allowed to intrude upon the clichéd hysteria about "leaving Europe", as if Britain was about to be towed in hostile currents somewhere north of Iceland.

On the morning after the vote, a BBC radio reporter welcomed politicians to his studio as old chums. "Well," he said to "Lord" Peter Mandelson, the disgraced architect of Blairism, "why do these people want it so badly?" The "these people" are the majority of Britons.

The wealthy war criminal Tony Blair remains a hero of the Mandelson "European" class, though few will say so these days. The Guardian once described Blair as "mystical" and has been true to his "project" of rapacious war. The day after the vote, the columnist Martin Kettle offered a Brechtian solution to the misuse of democracy by the masses. "Now surely we can agree referendums are bad for Britain", said the headline over his full-page piece. The "we" was unexplained but understood just as "these people" is understood. "The referendum has conferred less legitimacy on politics, not more," wrote Kettle. " … the verdict on referendums should be a ruthless one. Never again."

The kind of ruthlessness Kettle longs for is found in Greece, a country now airbrushed. There, they had a referendum and the result was ignored. Like the Labour Party in Britain, the leaders of the Syriza government in Athens are the products of an affluent, highly privileged, educated middle class, groomed in the fakery and political treachery of post-modernism. The Greek people courageously used the referendum to demand their government sought "better terms" with a venal status quo in Brussels that was crushing the life out of their country. They were betrayed, as the British would have been betrayed.

On Friday, the Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was asked by the BBC if he would pay tribute to the departed Cameron, his comrade in the "remain" campaign. Corbyn fulsomely praised Cameron's "dignity" and noted his backing for gay marriage and his apology to the Irish families of the dead of Bloody Sunday. He said nothing about Cameron's divisiveness, his brutal austerity policies, his lies about "protecting" the Health Service. Neither did he remind people of the war mongering of the Cameron government: the dispatch of British special forces to Libya and British bomb aimers to Saudi Arabia and, above all, the beckoning of world war three.

In the week of the referendum vote, no British politician and, to my knowledge, no journalist referred to Vladimir Putin's speech in St. Petersburg commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June, 1941. The Soviet victory at a cost of 27 million Soviet lives and the majority of all German forces won the Second World War.

Putin likened the current frenzied build up of Nato troops and war material on Russia's western borders to the Third Reich's Operation Barbarossa. Nato's exercises in Poland were the biggest since the Nazi invasion; Operation Anaconda had simulated an attack on Russia, presumably with nuclear weapons. On the eve of the referendum, the quisling secretary-general of Nato, Jens Stoltenberg, warned Britons they would be endangering "peace and security" if they voted to leave the EU. The millions who ignored him and Cameron, Osborne, Corbyn, Obama and the man who runs the Bank of England may, just may, have struck a blow for real peace and democracy in Europe.

[Paul Rigby]

Aftershock. The UK After Brexit

http://sputniknews.com/radio_level_talk/...rexit.html

18:26 24.06.2016(updated 00:25 25.06.2016)

John Harrison

In this program, David Coburn, MEP for Scotland and leader of UKIP Scotland; Dr Paul Monaghan, Scottish National Party MP and Dr Richard Wellings, Deputy Academic and Research Director & Head of Transport at the IEA, talk about the geopolitical and economic effects of leaving, and discuss the outcome on anti-Russian sanctions.

For David Coburn, this is a dream come true: "I have been working on this since 1975, since I was 16 years old, so yes, it's a fulfilment of a long battle." Dr Monaghan expressed that he was tremendously disappointed with the result of the referendum; "I think it is tragic that the people of England have voted to leave the EU, there is a very positive result in Scotland where the people of Scotland have voted to stay in the EU, and want to see their EU citizenship protected."

To a question on whether the UK stay together as a single country, Dr Richard Wellings pointed out that calling a Scottish referendum now would not perhaps be the best thing to do because Scotland is in a weak position economically, with the fall in the oil prices, poor demographics, it is doubtful that Germany would want to support another weak part of Europe. Dr Monaghan said that: "…Nicola Sturgeon has said that in the case of a remain vote in Scotland and a leave vote in England, that it is demographically unacceptable for the people of Scotland to be dragged out of the EU. This does give the Scottish people a mandate, how they use it is up to them."

On the subject of what will happen to the rest of Europe, Dr Wellings expressed that he does not see any immediate race for the rest of the EU break up, he even sees the EU bureaucracy possibly using this as a way to further EU integration. But he also points out that: "…the problem is that the UK was one of the major contributors into the EU, and without the UK, Germany and other countries will have to pay more into the system, and that could be the breaking point with German taxpayers." David Coburn believes that it is all going to break up, as "when we leave, it is only Germany and Britain that keeps the whole thing afloat financially. …The Dutch will soon follow, then the Czech Republic and so on." David sees the EU as: "an unelected authoritarian dictatorship. …I want to be ruled by my own parliament, and so does everybody else."

Dr Wellings suggests that there is a case for more decentralisation within the EU. Dr Monaghan said that it is still too early to say what the EU will look like after the UK has gone: "…the parties who wish for independence are often small, often on the far right, and not necessarily representative of the democracies around the EU. I think the EU will continue to exist and will continue to offer a lot to its member states and their populations."

After talking about the effect of Brexit on the UK economy, guests gave their opinions about the very important issue of whether Brexit will affect Britain's position as part of the the pan-European anti-Russian sanctions. Dr Wellings thinks that probably not, "because the pressure from the sanctions is mostly coming from the US, and the rest of Europe is going to remain very much still a part of the US-Europe alliance. But the sanctions are quite telling because they are showing us how weak the EU economy is…" David said simply that we should be friends, not enemies with the Russians, "…we have a lot more in common with them than anybody else. The EU has caused nothing but trouble over Ukraine and almost caused a war. Dr Monaghan agrees with David on one point, that we should be friends with the Russian Federation, but also says that the outcome of this referendum will not have any impact on sanctions.

[Paul Rigby]

Meet 10 Britons who voted to leave the EU

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016...ave-the-eu

On 23 June, Britain voted to end its 43-year relationship with the EU. We spoke to people around the country who responded to a Guardian callout to find out why they voted to leave, and whether they're happy with the outcome.

Here's what they said.

For a better standard of life

I want a stable country where people from all counties across the UK are heard and not fed scraps from the south. I don't want to fear that when my daughter has children there's no room in schools due to overcrowding, or if she has health issues a medical appointment doesn't take longer than growing a baby.

We should feel safe in our jobs and not feel as though if we're not willing to work seven days a week, 10 hours a day then someone can quite easily be drafted in from abroad and subsequently thrown on the unemployment pile further straining local economy.

When every Briton lives a suitable standard of life, then my tax money can be spent elsewhere. When the systems put into place NHS, state schools, housing are well-equipped and capable of looking after each individual residing in the UK, then we can accept more and do right by others.

We, the little people, or even the big boys that apparently run the country haven't got full control over what happens, and if suffering a downturn in wages due a weaker economy over trading deals is a price to pay to make the country and its people better educated and in a full bill of health then so be it.

The image of racism is far from true and shouldn't be used as a smear against the voiceless that live day-to-day with the consequences of the decision makers that reside in a London borough away from real life and constantly roll the shit downhill.

What the writers in a swanky London office or sat at home at a fine oak table with an Apple Mac drinking espresso from Starbucks don't realise is that the leave voters from wherever they're from aren't afraid of rolling up their sleeves and putting in the graft that will make the country great.

[Paul Rigby]

In this Brexit vote, the poor turned on an elite who ignored them

Ian Jack

The neglected suddenly discovered they could use their EU referendum vote to get back at those who had never listened to their grievances

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...poor-elite

Just as the pound was reaching its peak, Iain Duncan Smith said: "Turnout in the council estates is very high." It was about quarter past ten. When he added a few minutes later that he'd been in politics for 24 years and couldn't remember seeing an equivalent council-estate turnout before, David Dimbleby wondered about its significance: was it good news for the Brexit campaign? Duncan Smith said piously that he couldn't possibly say, but we knew that he thought it was. By midnight, the pound had begun its fall.

My wife and I grew up on council estates small, well-gardened ones, a hundred miles from each other across the border of Scotland and England. Almost everyone we knew lived similarly. People of our parents' generation thought of public housing as a blessing, compared to the shabby and cramped homes they had lived in before. "They talk about council estates as though they're slums," my wife said as we watched the coverage. Or native reservations, I thought. Earlier that day on our London high street, a canvasser for remain told me how they divided the work: the Greens got the tube stations, Lib Dems did the shoppers, Labour went "round the estates".

And, outside Scotland and London, they were mostly ignored. "A large constituency of working-class voters feel that not only has the economy left them behind, but so has the culture," the American political philosopher Michael Sandel said in a recent interview. "The sources of their dignity, the dignity of labour, have been eroded and mocked by … globalisation, the rise of finance, the attention that is lavished by parties across the political spectrum on economic and financial elites, [and] the technocratic emphasis of the established political parties." A lot of the energy animating Brexit, said Sandel, had been "born of this failure of elites".

Sandel refers to a failure common to the western world. But when did the elites begin to fail Britain in particular? An economic historian might point to a period in the late 19th century when Germany overtook Britain in chemical research and technical education and, together with America, began to replace it as the world's supreme industrial nation. But that was an unconscious failure; active betrayal has come within living memory. As a journalist working in the 1960s and 1970s, I grew used to the story of the factory closure, but only in the 1980s did these apparently random events accumulate to become known by a word, deindustrialisation, that implied a process governments either couldn't stop, chose not to stop, or took steps to encourage.

The effects across large parts of Britain were spectacular. The big industrial cities had stored up enough capital in terms of public institutions and professional jobs to survive and sometimes prosper as regional capitals. But their hinterlands the settlements strung along smoky valleys and perched on the oily river's edge began to look as abandoned as goldrush towns. Coatbridge, Consett, Hartlepool, Merthyr, Sunderland, Burnley, Greenock, Accrington: unless a senior football team played or a murder took place, they dropped from the national consciousness.

The depth of their oblivion was exemplified when, in a referendum debate on Sky TV, Michael Gove spoke of how his father's fish business in Aberdeen had been "destroyed by the European Union", which had "hollowed out" communities across Britain. In fact, a report in the Guardian showed that the senior Gove had sold his business rather than closed it, and that factors other than the EU were then shrinking Aberdeen's fishing industry, including over-fishing.

What nobody remarked on was the absurdity of Gove calling the EU a job destroyer, when far heavier destruction was inflicted by British government policy during those years. When Mrs Thatcher came to office in 1979, manufacturing accounted for almost 30% of Britain's national income and employed 6.8 million people; by 2010, it accounted for 11% and employed 2.5 million. And, unlike Mr Gove, a welder who was thrown out of work by a closing Sunderland shipyard had no business to sell.

In no other major economy was industrial collapse so quick. For a time, well-meaning journalists reported the catastrophe, and then gradually the sight of empty towns and shuttered shops became normalised or forgotten.

It seemed there was nothing to be done. At one time, the country's prosperity had been underpinned by the spinning, weaving, stitching, hammering, banging, welding and smelting that went on in the manufacturing towns; much of the country's former character was also owed to them non-conformist chapels, brass bands, giant vegetable championships, self-improvement, association football. Surely nothing as significant to the nation's economy, culture or politics would ever emerge from them again? And then it did: grievance. Actually, more than that: the sudden discovery that in certain and perhaps unrepeatable circumstances, the poor could use their grievance about all kinds of things to change at least one.

It first became apparent in the Scottish referendum of 2014. Only four local voting areas out of 32 returned a majority for independence and all of them bore the scars of vanished industries. The SNP had broken through years of eroding Labour tradition to capture the loyalty of people in the big housing schemes, for whom the leap in the dark of constitutional change offered promise rather than threat (after all, what else had worked?). By the time of last year's general election, thousands of underprivileged local authority tenants felt themselves for the first time to be part of a political movement. I noticed the paradox after Nicola Sturgeon addressed an anti-Trident rally in Glasgow, and wrote: "Only now, with the west of Scotland nearly expunged as an economic force, does the political will of its people keep the rest of the country awake."

On Thursday, much of northern England went to vote in a similar mood. Immigration, actual or potential, mattered too. There may also have been Spitfire enthusiasts. But betrayal, grievance, dispossession: these were surely what counted for most. I feel sorrow that the British story should have such an unexpected end murdered by the poor and neglected English who were already inside the keep.