Liddle again.

[George C.]

https://twitter.com/sunny_hundal/sta...974366726?s=19

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

"I'll tell you who wrote that....."

[Nefertiti2]

[URL]https://twitter.com/tompowdrill/status/1140271214818148355?s=21[/URL]

[Bored Of Education]

What is that referring to?

[ad hoc]

Not read the piece obv, but I presume it's an addition to the racist shit being spread by the far right re: the Peterborough bye-election, in which families of Pakistanis voted, and clearly didn't vote for Brexit. I mean how dare they vote at all!

[ursus arctos]

Sunday Times column, it appears

[URL="https://twitter.com/miqdaad/status/1140293346000351232?s=21"]https://twitter.com/miqdaad/status/1140293346000351232[/URL]

[Etienne]

He's obviously a cunt, but I think it's particularly cuntish to make a racist aside, and then claim that it's political correctness gone mad to describe it as a racist aside. It's not a fucking dogwhistle. It's just plain racist.

[Nefertiti2]

The Times and the Sunday Times are far worse than the Mail these days

[Ginger Yellow]

Oh, man, this post is like OTF bingo.

[Gerontophile]

However my level of rage will be after reading that, I ain't registering.

[ursus arctos]

Remember blockchain for Brexit? That wonderfully terrible idea that seems to get trotted out every couple of months or so, almost as if it were designed simply to bait us block-pained folk here at FT Alphaville?

The first person to make the idea famous, of course, was none other than Chancellor of the Exchequer Phillip “Spreadsheet Phil” Hammond himself, who said the magical distributed spreadsheet was the “most obvious” solution to the tiny issue of the Irish Border.

This time, it’s the turn of the nation’s (least?) favourite provocateur Rod Liddle, whose new book on Brexit, The Great Betrayal, suggests blockchain could solve “almost all” the problems of the Irish Border. (H/T Ben Munster over at Decrypt Media for drawing our attention to this, via a Guardian review of the book, which calls Liddle’s blockchain-solutionism “childish”).

So we headed on over to Google Books for a quick preview. We counted eight instances of the word blockchain. Take a look at this excerpt from the book:

Borders today are not so much geographical as rooted in time. The movement of goods and people does not need to be physically checked at the point of entry: there are a multitude of ways around the problem. But the government seemed either uninterested in them or utterly ignorant of them. Blockchain technology, for example, is used to keep a record of transactions in various cryptocurrencies, but is increasingly deployed by big companies to keep track of goods travelling to and fro.

Ah yes that old “big companies are increasingly using blockchain” trope. But at least the good people of the island of Ireland now know that the border that divides them is these days not really geographical at all, but ratherrooted in time. Blockchain should help that.

He continues:

What did the government know about blockchain?... Asked about the problem of border relations with Ireland, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, said: “There is a technology becoming available… I don’t claim to be an expert on it but the most obvious is blockchain.” The insouciance and the ineptitude amaze. Why aren’t you an expert on it, Phil? Is there nobody in your department who it an expert on blockchain?

Yeah Phil.Why didn’t you bother becoming an expert in cryptography and distributed database systems when you decided to become a politician? And why isn’t someone at the Treasury a crypto coder? The ineptitude of it all!

(To be fair, the former chairman of Phil’s party, Michael Green Grant Shapps, was chairing an all-party-parliamentary committee on blockchain, but he stepped down after, Alphaville found out he had a secret pay deal with a... blockchain company.)

Then we get to the bit where Rod implies blockchain can solve “almost all” the problems surrounding the Irish backstop (parentheses his; emphasis ours):

Both Leo Varadkar and the EU negotiating team stuck fast to the notion that technology would not solve the Irish question, it could only be solved by the UK ceding ground and agreeing, in effect, to a customs union with the EU. This was, of course, a convenient line for them to hold as it places the pressure on the UK -- and held it was until the spring of 2019, when Varadkar suddenly admitted that technology (basically blockchain) could solve almost all of the problems surrounding this “backstop” business, except for maybe the transportation of livestock. Brussels agreed — but the UK was still miles behind the curve.

Yeah, Leo. Why didn’t you just admit that this intensely sensitive political, social, cultural, religious, economic and historical issue could be solved with blockchain? Coz technology IS blockchain after all.

For anyone curious about the Irish border actually looks like, here’s a picture of a part of it, taken by our FT colleague Philip “Blockchain Phil” Stafford himself, on a recent visit:
See? Just stick a blockchain on the other side of that stone wall there. Job done.

[Nefertiti2]

[URL]https://twitter.com/hannahrosewoods/status/1160517269753147392?s=21[/URL]

The transformation is complete.

[ad hoc]

Not surevif it's a transformation any more. He's basically just a clickbait troll, and has taken the Burchill approach and run with it. Odds on him calling for re-education camps for "remoaners" by September?

[Nefertiti2]

Not surevif it's a transformation any more. He's basically just a clickbait troll, and has taken the Burchill approach and run with it. Odds on him calling for re-education camps for "remoaners" by September?

he'll probably be running them by then.

[George C.]

UA's last link. WTF.

Was Liddle on crack when he wrote such absolute drivel?

[Snake Plissken]

It's a strong start in the competition to be the Lewis Prothero of our glorious post-Brexit future.

[hobbes]

Well hang on. He does have something there.
We could always send everyone who voted Brexit to Afghanistan or Syria with a handful of rifles, couldn't we?
Irrespective of age or class I mean.
They couldn't do any more real damage over there and Imagine the benefits to the NHS, the housing crisis (all those suddenly available family homes in Surrey!) the drop in welfare expenditure on pensions etc.

[Kevin S]

Yes, that's the logical conclusion from the headline. People who voted remain obviously are happier people (or at least were in 2016) because they were willing to vote for the status quo. The unhappy people voted leave, so they can piss off and do a war somewhere. Though I'd vote for Mars myself, rather than inflict them on some poor other nation.