Spectator weighs in on brexit - Polidicks

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/02/the-eus-hard-border-bluff-will-soon-collapse-and-then-it-can-get-serious-about-brexit/ It's paywalled but you can easily get around it, here's the content coz its the spectator and they're a buncha scumbags who don't deserve money. (emphasis mine) The House of Commons does work better than it seems to, I promise you. When a big subject comes up, it spends weeks, months, even years, posturing and sparring, but it has a way of working out when a choice is truly important. Brexit has taken years, and is truly important. We saw the first signs of this realisation dawning on Parliament when it rejected Mrs May’s original deal so decisively. We saw the second signs on Tuesday night. As that series of covert Remain amendments — most notably Cooper-Boles — fell, a pattern became apparent. Enough MPs now understand that if the institution of parliament is ever to command respect again, Brexit must happen, and the minimally acceptable way in which it must happen is that the permanent Irish backstop goes. The only blot was the vote for the Spelman amendment objecting to ‘no deal’. But this does not bind, and the rest of the dynamic of the evening makes clear for slow learners what has been apparent to sensible people ‘out of doors’ from the beginning — the only way for Britain to win any decent deal is to make no deal a real possibility. When Juncker, Varadkar and co understand that without a deal, their ‘hard border’ bluff collapses, they too might get serious. Jeremy Corbyn was well characterised by Liam Fox this week as ‘a Leaver in the north and a Remainer in the south’. Given his difficult position just now, this seems prudent, though not edifying. It is a modern political analogue of the rule that the monarch, though Supreme Governor of the Church of England, becomes, when she/he crosses the border, a member of the Church of Scotland. Cuius regio, eius religio (though one must not forget that most bits of the south, outside London, are Leave-supporting too). Unfortunately for Mr Corbyn, though, not everyone in his party is impressed, as the votes on Tuesday night showed. What to do about the coming shortage of green groceries of which several supermarkets warned yet again this week if there is a no-deal Brexit on 29 March? I am just old enough to remember when fresh fruit and veg were in short supply at this time of year. People used to know how to store things to mitigate the problem: apples would be carefully laid out on straw-strewn shelves. We ate lots of root vegetables and not much greenery. If ever you saw a strawberry out of season it came, for some reason, from Israel. Perhaps it is time for a Brexit recipe book, like those comforting wartime rationing ones full of bright ideas for dull things. In our part of the south coast we have racier ideas. We have a centuries-old tradition of smuggling (‘brandy for the parson, baccy for the clerk’), and are ready to set out in our little ships to Dunkirk or wherever and bring back luscious black-market lettuces and French beans, oranges and lemons. Our Sussex and Kent smugglers used to be known as ‘free traders’, which is interesting and — if we have to sneak over an EU tariff wall — entirely appropriate for today. My thanks to David Dilks, the distinguished historian, who emails me to question Philip Hammond’s recently repeated assertion — to justify his opposition to no deal — that no one in the EU referendum ‘voted to be worse off’. Professor Dilks points out that the Treasury, the department which Mr Hammond now runs, said again and again before the vote that we would be poorer, as did the Bank of England. Therefore, people did vote Leave believing they would be worse off, or did not believe the Treasury and the Bank. Mr Hammond’s Treasury is not telling us anything now that is new, or more believable than what Mr Osborne’s Treasury told us then. Personally, I do not believe that we shall be poorer after Brexit, even without a deal, except in the very short term; but Mr Hammond should consider the fact, almost unimaginable to a man like him, that some people do not put money above everything else. Police Professional is, in its own words, ‘a weekly printed publication and online resource for UK law enforcement’. Last week, it ran a story about the review of the government’s counter-extremism programme, Prevent. It quoted the view of Cage, which it describes as ‘an independent organisation that campaigns against discriminatory state practices and works with survivors of abuse and mistreatment across the world’. Cage is actually an extreme Islamist organisation. Its research director, Asim Qureshi, famously described ‘Jihadi John’, the British killer who worked for Isis, as ‘a beautiful young man’. Dr Qureshi is still in post more than three years later and is referred to uncritically in Police Professional, as he attacks Prevent. Imagine the uproar if the magazine had accorded such authority to, say, the English Defence League. Yet Cage is actually even more extreme, by some margin, than the EDL. Despite its name, on the subject of counter-extremism, Police Professional is a rank amateur. Such a sad sight at Davos last week. A 16-year-old Swedish schoolgirl called Greta Thunberg gave an eloquent little speech about the perils of global warming. Only 12 years left before it’s too late, she said, invoking the IPCC’s estimate. ‘I don’t want you to be hopeful,’ she went on, ‘I want you to panic.’ Poor girl, that she should have been persuaded by grown-ups of such imminent catastrophe, that this should be blighting her young life, and that she sees the solution as ‘panic’. The people who have inculcated in her these life-destroying thoughts have much to answer for. Public schoolboys are increasingly speaking ‘mockney’, it is reported. This is not a solely modern phenomenon. There was an accent known as ‘Mayfair cockney’, used by Edward VIII when Prince of Wales (as Duke of Windsor later, he developed American vowels) and therefore fashionable in the 1930s. One symptom was pronouncing the word ‘no’ as ‘neow’. The only surviving practitioners I remember hearing myself were Lord Thorneycroft (Eton) and Bill Deedes (Harrow). Solution to brexit food shortages: Rationing recipe books Smuggling This is fuckin nuts. This is where the conversation is at. From "350m to the NHS" and "leaving the sinking ship" to rationing books, "dunkirk spirit" and evacuating the queen. And yet we persist. We should be quarantined to stop the rest of the world from catching whatever brain rot we've got going on.

I'm honestly done with caring about the future. As with Mr. Donald Trump, I'm just hoping we collectively fuck the world up hard enough to bounce back better, despite the pain that will cause. Watched the video of Farage announcing the referendum's results and declaring the date to be "Britain's Independence Day", which is offensive for so many reasons. Your Independence Day isn't supposed to be a day where you shoot your entire country in the collective foot by way of dishonest campaigning and an uneducated populace voting "Yes/No" on an issue with THOUSANDS OF RAMIFICATIONS. It's supposed to represent the struggles your country faced (How many wars of Independence have we had globally? American, Estonian, Greek etc etc?) and the people that died so you could be FREE from oppression. NOT celebrating how you leave your position of influence so that you're now weaker on the world stage and will have to submit to the EU in soft power and trade negotiations. How can anyone read how the World is going and has been going and remain optimistic about the future as a whole?

Trump's reign of terror will come to an end sooner or later, and measures will be taken to help prevent that from happening again. It'll take years, maybe decades but the country's learning from it. As for Brexit i'm hopeful as the deadline comes closer they'll get cold feet and try to find a way out of it. If Brexit does happen the damage it does might be enough for the EU to give them a chance to pretend like it never happened.

uh they are aware france has a large navy and a lot of frigates and submarines, their little dunkirk fantasy will get squashed

That's an incredibly destructive mindset. What we do or don't do now determines wheter the fuck up lasts for years or decades or more Also things don't just "bounce back up", things get better when people arduously work towards a better future instead of resigning to doomsday scenarios Societies today still are suffering from racist, classist and corrupt governments of the distant past because people back then didn't succeed at stopping or mitigating them

Sometimes I wonder if people saw the Norsefire party as a guide, or something.

It doesn't much matter when the people arduously working towards a better future are outspent and outvoted by those who would rather keep the working class dumb and complacent, and milk every dollar they can. There is a point at which your momentum as a society in some X direction is too big to be changed. I just don't know if we're at that point yet.

Well the bad guys (not fucking around being polite, these are fucking bad people) ain't giving up, they can and will make things worse and the only thing stopping them are a bunch of normal people either through voting and/or demonstration.

This goes beyond just class, this is people on both sides of the class fence, both lower and upper. Desperately chasing the fantasy they've been spoonfed since birth. All this Blitz Spirit and Plucky old Blighty fight back against the foreign hordes that were born too late to actually witness the reality of. Real life isn't as exciting as the stories they've grown up hearing, and the reality that the UK is mostly a poorly run austerity ridden island that generally seems a bit shit doesn't appeal to them. So they'd rather artificially construct a national crisis in order to set the country back into WW2 mode because apparently the period of time where we had to evacuate every child from London and people died in hastily dug out bomb shelters is the golden age we must aspire to.

So why shouldn't we do everything we can to stop it from reaching that point of no return And even if it does, doing good is not futile. Example, nobody could stop holocaust once it got going, but you don't think it's meaningless that people risked life and limb to help jews escape it, do you?

Perhaps it is time for a Brexit recipe book, like those comforting wartime rationing ones full of bright ideas for dull things. Remember the good ol' days of World War 2? Those were great times.

So tired of this crap, "Bwaaa you don't know how easy you got it why back in my day lunch consisted of sucking nutrients out the wallpaper", why are they actively cheering on an overall decrease in living standards, in what way does this benefit anybody? Leavers have lost their goddamn minds, Scottish independence can't come soon enough. Also, what the fuck is this, Spectator? A 16-year-old Swedish schoolgirl called Greta Thunberg gave an eloquent little speech about the perils of global warming. Only 12 years left before it’s too late, she said, invoking the IPCC’s estimate. ‘I don’t want you to be hopeful,’ she went on, ‘I want you to panic.’ Poor girl, that she should have been persuaded by grown-ups of such imminent catastrophe, that this should be blighting her young life, and that she sees the solution as ‘panic’. The people who have inculcated in her these life-destroying thoughts have much to answer for. I wouldn't even dignify this paragraph by wiping my shitter with it. What a bunch of condecending cunts.

It seems strange and sometimes hopeless to me because atleast in the past there has been direct resistance from people while it seems like today the important influencial actors are no longer people but complex systems such as corporations. How can you have an impact when it doesn't matter how right you are, the narratives that people buy into are those with power (money) behind them. It seems hopeless to me sometimes when I see people fighting for the environment or for human rights and they're barely acknowledged by the world, meanwhile just seemingly random things go viral all the time and there's advertisements reaching the whole world in a heartbeat all the time. I feel like the economy is too powerful for us "mere humans".

Could Hitler be stopped before World War 2? Probably, but back then people thought it would all blow over. Sometimes everything just burns down to the ground just because no one can truly comprehend how seriously deep in shit we are. History is full of this shit. Everyone's too busy living their day to day lives to have time to consider the long term. And even if we do, it's just a short moment of panic before it's back to business as usual. Our brains just aren't wired to deal with it. We just carry on and hope everything works out. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. As the old Chinese curse goes; we truly live in interesting times right now.

The guy literally seems unhinged. Whinging about the EU and Corbyn, to ww2 rations, to smuggling, to comparing some random guy with the EDL, to that kid at Davos. Some senile grave dodging gammon unleashing a stream of consciousness upon the unsuspecting public.

Seems the writer doesn't believe in climate change and wants the youth of the world to do what he does: Plug his ears and shove his head into the sand, and ignore those sciency-people with the degrees and the lifetime of experience studying these patterns and systems. Interesting that he says "The people who have inculcated these beliefs in her have much to answer for." Never forget that the political ideologue, of whatever wingnut variety you choose to pick, has no respect or interest in science beyond that which either helps to confirm their own beliefs, or which assists them in the task of blowing shit up. If you do climate research, well you're a naughty boy for making the youth rightfully worried about their prospects for the future, and if these folks had it their way, you'd have a one-way ticket to the struggle-session! "Much to answer for." Fucking scum.

"Mob law ruled in Berlin throughout the afternoon and evening and hordes of hooligans indulged in an orgy of destruction. I have seen several anti-Jewish outbreaks in Germany during the last five years, but never anything as nauseating as this. Racial hatred and hysteria seemed to have taken complete hold of otherwise decent people. I saw fashionably dressed women clapping their hands and screaming with glee, while respectable middle-class mothers held up their babies to see the "fun"." History repeats itself, just waiting for the racism to become even more apparent and another kristallnacht to happen.

It sure tends to feel hopeless in the face of such leviathan construct, but overall people are slowly becoming more aware of the systems that control their lives, and hardly anyone likes them. We're not mind controlled puppets yet.

I'd say we're less mind controlled than ever due to how information now spreads at the speed of light everywhere. The issue is that we're more complacent than ever. Having a job and maintaining the ignorant bliss gained through constant streams of entertainment is all most people need these days. We could live in a relative utopia compared to what we have now if the entire working class population of the world went on strike for a week and demanded fair compensation, ready to do it again when inevitably gutted by those who profit from their work the most. That however is not ever going to happen. This line of thinking is dangerously close to class warfare and proletariat vs bourgeoisie but it fits entirely.

History doesn't "repeat itself". Humans do commit atrocities as they've done for thousands of years, but that happens less and less because people care and put effort into living in less shitty societies

Which is why hate crimes in the USA are now on an upward trend (Starting with the 2015 race) with a racist-sympathizing and empowering president despite going down under Obama. You're being complacent and presuming humans will act the way you think they will. There's no guarantee that the general trends will keep moving in that direction. Correct me if I'm wrong but haven't hate crime occurrences in Finland increased like 50% compared to 2014 and 2013?

Perhaps it is time for a Brexit recipe book, like those comforting wartime rationing ones full of bright ideas for dull things. How, how, fucking HOW do you look at wartime rationing cookbooks and think 'ya know, those things were onto something'? Dear writer, did your mother drink when she was pregnant with you? Heavily? Because it's the only explanation I can think of for being this immensely, terrifyingly, buttfuckingly STUPID.

"Comforting" "Wartime rationing" It's easy to say it when you never had to go through it. And considering that Charles Moore was born 2 years after rationing ended...

Progress is not a linear path. During the past one hundred years there's been massive improvement on overall well-being of all people despite every war, unrest and atrocity that's happened. It doesn't happen automatically which is why we as people have to work towards progress. Bad things happening doesn't nullify the purpose of good as you seem to imply. The bad things will just get even worse if you give up trying.

I think in a dark way we are lucky to have the environment fighting back because it seems like the one thing you can't just ignore forever, living in ignorance and relative comfort and therefor be complacent.

Literally "Hahahahahahahaha How The Fuck Is Climate Cange Real Hahahaha Nigga Just Walk Away From The Window Like Nigga Just Close Your Eyes Haha".

I'll be straight up honest with people entertaining the thoughts in this article: don't. Wanting '[food] from the EU' and smuggling to get it is a crime. This is not the 20th century, this activity is easy to see, not worth the effort and is prosecuted. Britain will not starve, the supply chain disruption might just stop you from getting your [favourite good] for up to a month. Nut up and exercise adult patience and in a year it'll be fine, almost the same as before.

I know that dude, that part is obvious. Taking it for granted that we won't regress back (aka that this article's writer's future doesn't come true) isn't a given.

After the initial supply shortages, everything that was available before a no-deal Brexit goes into effect will be available again, just at an increased price as importing companies pass on the increased cost of the WTO trade rules onto consumers. It's not an apocalyptic scenario, just a shit(-er) one for individuals and families that were already struggling financially under the tory austerity government.

So yet another boomer with typically British delusions of empire and glory wanking over Brexit, and romanticising shit in WW2 like rationing. If their parents read this article, they'd probably slap them.