The Brexit Thread

[Snake Plissken]

This is what she’s reduced to.

https://twitter.com/MichaelLCrick/status/1065997850239295488

[Pérou Flaquettes]

Didn’t realise Casimir was writing for Marianne

Yeah, funny word that (has been around in this acceptation for about 15 years I'd say). Here's an example right up your legal street:

Gloubi-Boulga Judiciaire

[Diable Rouge]

Support for May's deal is slowly building:

http://twitter.com/britainelects/status/1066049396373184513

[sw2borshch]

To be fair, the Guardian describes Macron as 'pro-business' here.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...ely-off-colour

[Diable Rouge]

After Sanchez mouths off about Gibraltar, Vox naturally rise to 6% in the next Andalusian poll:

http://twitter.com/electo_mania/status/1065963521958129664

[Alderman Barnes]

Support for May's deal is slowly building:

http://twitter.com/britainelects/status/1066049396373184513

I must say, it was nice of the BBC to give her a radio show to plug it.

They're all going to fall in behind this shit deal in the end, aren't they?

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Also, something odd and half-arsed that struck me in the same Guardian article that I hyperlinked in my post #10048 (the previous one, with the big bollocks groundbreaking European map & study that the Guardian says has never been done before). I found this sentence: Perhaps as remarkable as that, her [Marine Le Pen] first-round score was little higher than that of Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the surging populist leftwing group La France Insoumise.

So, the Guardian has categorised Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise party as far left (very debatable) and therefore populist, which is a mistake IMO. How is Mélenchon more populist than the Socialists for instance? Or the LR party? (mainstream right). By that token, all parties are populist then (which they probably are to varying degrees of course but in the context of their study on populism, a very grey area therefore hard to define, they should really only have picked the blatantly populist parties, so for France only the Front National, and Debout La France maybe on the rare occasions when the latter have scored more than 2% which was one of the Guardian’s criteria for picking a party).

Benoît Hamon, the socialist candidate in last year’s Presidentials, wanted to create a Universal Income, which could be quite conceivably considered a populist measure. He had other "interesting" (i.e unfeasible) plans in his manifesto that nobody really bothered to read (the poor Hamon, who's now left the Parti Socialiste - like everyone else - to create his own party was saddled with Hollande's toxic legacy so he had no chance. He scored 6%). So why didn’t the Guardian pick the Parti Socialiste in their study then, at least for 2017?

Likewise, François Fillon, the disgraced Conservative candidate, vowed to slash 500,000 public sector jobs. This is of course a classic right-wing measure that could easily be considered populist as all the previous right-wing French presidents (say, Chirac or Sarkozy for instance) made the same pledges but never slashed many public sector jobs, not in those proportions anyway. Why didn’t the Guardian pick Fillon's party (LR) then? (again at least for 2017). To me, there’s not much difference between Mélenchon vs Hamon or Fillon in terms of populism.

See that Guardian article also struck me as really odd, coming from a country with four populist parties, and a quarter of the parliament filled with independent tds with a mandate to try and get a deal supporting a govt in return for making it rain like they were a cabinet minister.

The only reasonable definition of a populist party is whether or not they promise things that they can't possibly deliver. All Irish political parties promise to cut your taxes, increase spending on services for you and get you a better deal. Thing is, that covers most political parties everywhere. Every French party is definitely populist. in the UK, the tories promise to maintain pensions and the NHS while simultaneously cutting taxes on the wealthy, and the Labour party promise to improve public services without increasing taxes on basically anyone. Both offer Cake Brexit.

One of a big problems for established parties since 2012 is that they can't just promise any old shite any more. they have to squeeze all their promises into the available fiscal space. The thing is that this makes these promises seem very small. If an established party can't fit their promises into this box, they run the risk of being branded as liars, or simply innumerate incompetent bastards. However there's loads of parties that don't give a shit about these limits and promise any old shite, in the knowledge that they're unlikely to have to deliver any time soon. Except for in Italy, where everyone took it completely seriously, and voted for clowns and fascists who promised all sorts of lunacy.

The thing is that every political party everywhere on the left or on the right is basically tied into the same bind that they won't increase taxes. That makes things very tricky because they're all tied into the Eurozone rules that govern how you fund your expenditure. The only way in the medium term where govts are going to get extra money is by finding some european wide way of making companies pay tax and use that to fund investment, and ease their financial positions in general.

[Lucy Waterman]

I don't think that it matters whether the public want a general election or not - we should have one if it's necessary; and it Labour manage to get one via the Commons, then it's de facto necessary.

It matters for turnout. I’d expect a high turnout to benefit Labour.

[Diable Rouge]

It matters for turnout. I’d expect a high turnout to benefit Labour.

If it produces a hung Parliament, unlikely to change much overall, although confidence and supply between Labour and the SNP would certainly be a domestic improvement.

[Lucy Waterman]

I think confidence and supply would be great for Labour in Scotland, and I suspect Nicola does too. Don’t know what other option she’d have though.

[Lucy Waterman]

it’s important not to understate how critical turnout is going to be next time. The side that convinces people that this is one election they have to vote in - that side is going to win.

You’re not going to do that by dragging an unwilling public to the polls.

[Diable Rouge]

Guess which party said this, in 2014: "The Single Market is one of the European Union's most transformative assets. We want to maximise the economic opportunity it presents for Northern Ireland. With better connectivity, there is an inherent potential for economic growth, through the free movement of Labour, goods, capital and services. We want to help businesses and individuals in our local communities exploit this economic potential. We are committed to promoting NI's highly-skilled and highly-educated workforce at EU level, showcasing a hospitable business environment within the Single Market"?

Predictably, the DUP.

[johnr]

My point is that we have no idea whether they're unwilling or not.

[George C.]

I can't wait until it fails with a hard Brexit and a majority of the electorate are begging to be allowed back in...

[ad hoc]

I can't wait until it fails with a hard Brexit and a majority of the electorate are begging to be allowed back in...

If it weren't for the fact that a lot of people I know and love (and millions more entirely decent people who I've never met) will suffer massively in such a scenario, this would be my feeling too. Theoretically it would be perfect. In practice not so much

[George C.]

Agreed, not my choice remotely.

But extreme stances breed extreme remedies.

[Eggchaser]

I can't wait until it fails with a hard Brexit and a majority of the electorate are begging to be allowed back in...

But they won't. It will be spun as a betrayal of Brexit by out of touch elite politicians, the malevolent EU who refused to give us a reasonable deal and nebulous, shadowy behind the scenes figures.

[Diable Rouge]

The Spectator has a Liam Halligan article today on the Border - somehow, he believes that no-one mentioned the issue until Varadkar took office, even though the Irish government mentioned it continuously on UK media during the referendum campaign, and Kenny ensured it became one of the three core issues in the WA, repeatedly saying to May after the result that it would be preferable for the UK to stay in the Single Market and Customs Union. He then, rather predictably, turns to Trimble and Ray Bassett to back up his spurious points, but my personal favourite is when he says that FG are propped up by "Irish nationalists" - which may be historically true about FF, but not in any meaningful fashion since the Thirties.

[Lang Spoon]

He looks like a stinking drunk cokehead city boy rugger cunt. Does he think his surname allows him to print lies for that scumball Fraser Nelson.

[Lang Spoon]

Ireland is def being set up as The Enemy when Brexit fails to deliver sunlit uplands.

[Lucy Waterman]

My point is that we have no idea whether they're unwilling or not.

Has any polling been done on whether the public want a general election?

[Diable Rouge]

The number of UK applications for Irish passports up to the end of October has already matched the figure for the whole of 2017:

https://www.irishexaminer.com/breaki...rs-887562.html

https://www.independent.ie/business/...-36450675.html

[Pérou Flaquettes]

See that Guardian article also struck me as really odd, coming from a country with four populist parties, and a quarter of the parliament filled with independent tds with a mandate to try and get a deal supporting a govt in return for making it rain like they were a cabinet minister.

etc.

[sorry, I can only quote the beginning of your post as otherwise >10,000 characters and I’m buggered]



I agree with your post but there are levels in how populist parties are. We can say “all French [or insert any country] parties are populist” as you wrote and I did too in a different way, but it’s important to put things in perspective. If we deem all political parties to be populist, we must acknowledge that some are way more populist than others, and therefore we must categorise. Measuring populism is notoriously difficult but there are way to partially achieve that. As you write, you can look at parties’ manifestos and then check what % of pledges they’ve delivered on (subjective I know, but if you are to embark on a data-based study as the Guardian has done – which, as I wrote, is a poor idea IMO – it’s something you must do, and thoroughly. Just labelling parties “populist”, “far left”, “far right”, “Eurosceptic” on face value and as they seem to have done here is too vague and ultimately is bound to lead to flaws, which is blatant in this Guardian dossier. Good enough for a few articles but not for a data-driven study that purports to be groundbreaking.

Rooduijn produced a list of parties that could be categorised as either populist, far-right, far-left or Eurosceptic, using widely used academic definitions for those categorisations.

Besides, I doubt one person/researcher (as per the Guardian study, Matthijs Rooduijn), albeit a specialist, can produce with forensic precision a list of "populist" parties that registered >2% in at least 1 national election since 1998 in 31 European countries (Guardian’s criteria). It just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny and shouldn’t have satisfied the Guardian’s editors at the end of the chain, certainly not enough for them to claim that their study is the best thing since the invention of the saucisson guillotine.

I know there was peer review and that Matthijs Rooduijn submitted his list to a number of academics etc. but how well was the whole process conducted? How well was that peer review job done? You can’t obviously rely on your own knowledge here but this is a very onerous piece of research and it remains to be seen what degree of help he got from other academics abroad probably only superficially linked to this mammoth study. He had to do the groundwork, mostly on his own I suspect, and that also concerns me here as to the validity of this study.

For starters, technically, it would have been extremely difficult for him to do that thoroughly. He would have had to study 100s of manifestos for each year since 1998 for at least 1 election to ascertain how populist parties are before submitting them for peer review. I mean, just linguistically, it doesn’t add up unless the man speaks 20-odd languages very fluently. Practically speaking too it would have been very difficult. The Internet was nascent in 1997 (when the campaign for those 1998 elections would have started), most of these manifestos were not online in 1998 and in subsequent years. Access to party material going back 20 yrs throughout Europe would mean a heck of a lot of work with archives and stuff. It’s almost possible to do that in a thorough and meaningful way for so many countries, so I guess his findings involved a degree of guesswork before he contacted fellow academics. And the number of parties to look at with 2% + of the vote must be mind-boggling, just for France – notorious for its plethora of parties – that task alone would have taken him a long time.

Such studies have to draw the line somewhere (not sure where the Guardian lines are though), and as far as France and the UK are concerned, the Front National and Ukip are off the scale IMO, and has always been, and should really have been the only ones worthy of inclusion by the Guardian. Their manifestos over the last 20 years have been full of ridiculously unimplementable measures. Or if implemented, would have resulted in the whole thing ending in a civil war, or even conflicts/wars with other countries? (all sorts of wars: diplomatic war, commercial war etc.).

Hence my comment in post #10048: we should have been given a full list of the elections + parties they’ve based their findings on. Otherwise it’s effectively worthless. The Guardian has provided details on their methodology but didn't provide the full list. Why? Do they think that even half-clever readers with a modicum of knowledge on foreign politics would quickly see that it’s flawed. Probably. It’s a massive cop-out not to have included it, it really hinders comprehension and, perhaps more annoyingly, it assumes that their readers are a bunch of dimwits who won’t notice that the whole thing just doesn’t stack up.

It was easier pre-Internet for parties to get away with promising a lot and not delivering, they were under less scrutiny, there was no Internet etc. Much harder now. Also partially explained why Hollande ended up with abysmally low approval ratings (one of them was 4%, but for the whole of 2016 he was under 10%), they cannot blag their way as easily as before.

In France for instance, there’s been a couple of blogs/websites that tracked the "pledge performance" of the last 2 presidents. Hollande (2012-2017) for instance had 189 big pledges and sub-pledges in his 2012 manifesto, and only fully delivered on 35% of it and partially delivered on about 55% which is not too bad I suppose as it’s not like he can do what he wants of course, there’s a parliament, an opposition, institutions eg a Conseil Constitutionnel (which rejected some of his pledges, eg on he capping of domestic gas-electricity tariffs for instance), circumstances too (eg recession) etc.

The site luipresident.fr tracked Hollande’s performance so it was easy to check if you know how to interpret those things (it’s now unfortunately an empty shell as the website masters have released a book on it so presumably they didn’t want to leave their material on the Net), I mentioned this site and those pledges in this post:

https://www.onetouchfootball.com/sho...on-2017/page22

Mitterrand had his so called “110 propositions pour la France” in his electoral platform. French presidents often draw up a list of pledges and stick a number on it; Sarkozy came up with 32 pledges that he expounded in a book. Hollande went for 60 “grands engagements”, the site luiprésident.fr has subdivided them in 189 sub-pledges and checked what’s become of them, 66/189 have been fully honoured according to the site luipresident.fr.

Sarkozy (2007-2012) famously pledged to “bring down the public debt/GDP ratio under 60%” (it was ~65% when he took over) but the debt stood at nearly 90% by the end of his term! (it’s at 100% now, so comparatively not much higher).

OK, Sarkozy has mitigating circumstances since he arrived just as a big recession started (although it probably hit France less than other countries) but he borrowed so much that it spiked out of control, far more than his predecessors.



The man had built his 2007 presidential campaign on massively reducing borrowing, reducing the size of the state etc. but the duo Sarkozy-Fillon (prime minister) borrowed more than anyone in French political history, 600 billion in just 5 years! (+ 630bn under Mitterrand and + 580bn under Chirac but that was over 14 and 12 years respectively). Isn’t that populist enough to be included in the Guardian study? I’d say so, but it wasn’t. Sarkozy also talked a lot in his campaign about honesty in politics. Well, we know what happened to that.

What about the other European countries at roughly the same time as Sarkozy was in office, with parties that must have included plenty of debt-reduction rhetoric, how did these parties fare on their pre-election promises? That’s important to know in relation to the Guardian study. Well, not terribly well according to the graph below. Sarkozy added + 23 points GDP on the debt, several EU27 countries did far worse, including the UK, the UK debt really shot up in that period (recession). So shouldn’t those parties in power, which presumably also pledged to substantially reduce the debt knowing full well that it would be very difficult, be included in that Guardian study too?



(explanation provided for Portugal, Greece and Ireland here, under the graph): http://www.captaineconomics.fr/-gauc...-gouvernements

[Diable Rouge]

http://twitter.com/eucopresident/status/1066382617489096704

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Does anyone know where i can find the twitter message on here about the dissident IRA men with the bizarre wallpaper?