This just underscores that for many of the nutters, the solution to the Irish border is for the Republic to leave the EU to make life easier. They might be up for reconquering Ireland, but that brings a load of micks into the UK which is equally problematic.
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Assume this is just an administrative move, rather than any actual jobs resulting, but symbolic all the same:
https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2018...aviva-ireland/Comment
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There are indeed similarities between that Brexit’s angle (in my post #8645 + Times’ art.) and your list – same roots, same stock-in-trade– but there are also differences, especially in terms of scope, intensity, magnitude and repercussions.Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
We’ve entered a whole new dimension with Brexit. It’s in the same vein as yr list but on a gigantic scale. It’s been intense, relentless, with wall-to-wall coverage and countless articles like the one I posted, esp. in the last months as things are coming to a head. Brexit is your “Metric Martyrs” and bendy bananas crusaders x1,000, with the language and accompanying cast of cranks to match. And it’s not just the hard right peddling such rhetoric and Churchillian iconography, it’s much wider. British exceptionalism has been turned into a brand, with comical effects sometimes (Luxembourg PM in March: “They [UK] were in with a load of opt-outs. Now they are out, and want a load of opt-ins”). It’s Millwall’s “No one likes us we don’t care” x1000 but with a crucial twist: this time we care, because it’s going to hugely affect us, hence the ratcheting up of the desperate No Surrender message as if it was the last branch to cling onto.
Unlike your ordinary football rivalries and the little bubble of domestic politics, this shit involves important others (EU27) and has real, immediate consequences. This is the abyss; deadlines, possible shortages of everything, jobs on the line. We’re no longer basking in a virtual reality world where you can rant ad infinitum and then laugh it all off because accountability is nil. Nutters and far rightists can spout any nonsense they like in the UK or France, they never run anything. For all their blustering and huge media exposure, the Front National has only 7 MPs (out of 925) and ~1,300 elected officials out of 618,000 (mayors + municipal, dptmental & regional councillors).
Millions do vote for them and they have 40 MEPs between them (FN 16, UKIP 24 –on very low turnouts) and they influence national politics but they’re not in charge, they’re not accountable so somewhat irrelevant. And this is one of the main differences here: these people up to now have been mere passengers on the national political scene bus, they sat at the back of the coach and gobbed off, occasionally lobbing a stink bomb towards the front to inconvenience others and stir shit up. But on the Brexit bus, these loons and Tory UKippers are no longer disgruntled passengers, they’re trying to drive the fucking thing, it’s their one chance to create long-term chaos. And as they feel that they’re losing it, the language becomes increasingly desperate and hawkish. Brexit is reality, Brexit is not Farage or Le Pen ranting into the ether safe in the knowledge they’ll never be in charge. Brexit has hugely foregrounded these nutters and through them enabled nationalism and racism.
What we have now in Brexit is a mass of intractable contradictions, coupled with the fact that it’s dawned on many Brexiters that a no deal would screw the country along with their realisation that the UK has a weak hand. This combination has created palpable anger, and I’m talking vécu here, vile things I’ve heard or people I know have heard, comments in the media. Brexit has seriously emboldened people to go “unfiltered”, to let rip and spew out their prejudices and racism. These things were relatively marginal pre Brexit (post 1990, say).
England has become Brexitannia and as Moonlight comments, “It seems to entirely define English identity nowadays”. It doesn’t really but it feels like it as many Brexiters have been very vociferous and often been aided & abetted by supine, complicit media (eg BBC), borderline sycophantic at times, drowning out the voices of the remainers, the young people and the millions of EU28 citizens directly affected by Brexit. And who wants to hear boring moderates and Johnny Foreigners? Why give them airtime when you have Farage and Rees-Mogg on tap and you can go onto any high street in the country and hear salt of the earth British people express their will of the people™ opinions? They’re far more entertaining and patriotic than your average EU national, “citizens of nowhere” dixit May.
Yes, of course before Brexit all this British exceptionalism & xenophobia stuff was deeply embedded in the tabloids, in football etc. but it was dormant compared to now and almost coy, repressed even. And it was all a bit good-humoured too, defiantly innocuous, in a Dad’s Army, Up Yours Delors kind of way. It was seldom taken seriously also because the UK was a far more united society, EU citizens in the UK felt welcome and so on.
Something important too: we all knew it was there but not that many of us had really encountered it. It was avoidable and the nastiness was often played down. Few of these racists and Britain Über Alles people spoke out anyway or not in the same way as today. You could easily kid yourself that Britain was a much more tolerant society (cf my post on Reni Eddo-Lodge) than the sort of volatile countries you have on the Continent with their Front Nationals and their legacy of fascism.
Few people would have gainsaid you, it was FACT: Britain was by far the most tolerant country in Europe. The world’s Oldest Democracy™ was a beacon of open-mindedness, a multicultural society with equal chances for all.
Yes, OK, granted, UKIP was rising and even recorded 27% in the 2014 Europeans. But who cares about the Europeans? Turnouts are a joke, it’s meaningless euro crap. Belgium’s not even a proper country anyway and Brussels’ answer to Big Ben is a tyke who pisses on the street.
Yes, our vile tabloids have huge readerships but they don’t reflect the unique British character and our values of tolerance and individual freedom and mutual respect.
Yes, some of our football supporters are a bit nationalistic and violent but they’re young and they aren’t half provoked when they go abroad.
Yes, we want nothing to do with the € and Schengen and we need lots of opt-outs because we’re superior and saved Europe and we have Metric Martyrs but where’s the harm in expressing a bit of good old-fashioned British bulldogness, eh?
Yes, the Tories may not have the common good uppermost in mind but we’re the World’s 5th Biggest Economy™ with near-full employment unlike our neighbours, they all want to come here! 300,000 French people live in London alone! Boris keeps saying it so it must be true.
Etc.
Excuses aplenty were made, apologists were legion and it was all a bit jolly. If it polluted football at all, in the UK or abroad, it was dismissed as old school rivalry initiated by drunken idiots goaded into fighting. Ugly maybe but part and parcel of football, inconsequential and on a tiny scale.
The tabloids and social media have gone into overdrive. Racism has been normalised and hate mainstreamed. Eg Farage, who resigned from UKIP days after the ref, has been ubiquitous: he’s on TV & radio all the time, he’s even got his own radio show, on LBC. In 2016-17, an extra 28,000 hate crimes were recorded compared to 2014-15 (+35%), most of them race-related, and in 2017-18 + 42,000 compared to 2014-15 (+45%). People have been killed because of Brexit. It feels like a volcano of nausea has erupted since 2016, as if society has barfed the contents of its underbelly, whereas previously it’d have taken an antiemetic tablet if it felt dicky. The country is now deeply divided in a multitude of ways.
You just didn’t get all that before Brexit, not in that way anyway. Brexit did not create all of this of course but it magnified it thousandfold and reawakened old demons.Yes, racists lashed out online and their standard-bearers in the press raged about the EU & immigrants pre Brexit but they weren’t ubiquitous in the way they’ve become. If you didn’t read the Dailies or listened much to the radio, you barely knew they existed. I’d never heard of Andrew Pierce before Brexit for instance but suddenly, post ref’, he and his mates were all over the TV like a bad rash. Rod Liddle has never been the sanest of columnists but Brexit gave him the perfect excuse to pour extra torrents of abuse onto Eastern Europeans, the French, Irish etc.
The media just can’t get enough of these No Surrender alt-rightists who go on about “Vichy Britain” like in that Times article. In normal times, even with the far right agit-propping round the corner, you don’t have 10 DUP bible bashers holding a country to ransom and you don’t get people write plays on wonky carrots and the evil (Julie Burchill – with her ex husband advocating violence in The Sun, Tubby’s post #8582).
Pre Brexit, particularly in the UK, you knew they were around, you suspected they were biding their time but they didn’t necessarily enter your radar. Ditto their supporters on social media, those who call on war on Europe if the flights are grounded and pogroms on foreigners if “the will of the people™ is not respected”. Now that they’ve unleashed their poison urbi et orbi, you certainly notice them, whether you seek them out or not.
Brexit has been like a renaissance for many of these loons that many didn’t even know 2 yrs ago or had forgotten (I mean, who knew Rees-Mogg? Who remembered Redwood?), they’ve grabbed that chance with frothing delight. The Tories have lapped it up and availed themselves of this golden oppo to showcase their flagship Home Office policies of “hostile environment” (originally intended to deter illegal immigration but now affecting all immigrants, incl. EU nationals), to the evident delight of the electorate as the Tories keep being voted in.Comment
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Oui, monsieur
I didn't mean to deny or denigrate the order of magnitude increase in duration and vituperation, but rather sought to make the point that the fundamental trope is an old one and not some new invention of a transatlantic think tank or paymasters like the Mercers.Comment
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The transition extension appears to have been agreed:
http://twitter.com/bbclaurak/status/1052638560061292544
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You could easily kid yourself that Britain was a much more tolerant society (cf my post on Reni Eddo-Lodge) than the sort of volatile countries you have on the Continent with their Front Nationals and their legacy of fascism.
Not easy if you were Irish back in those good old days. Or indeed, part of a more obvious minority.Comment
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This is why I wrote (mid post): "These things were relatively marginal pre Brexit (post 1990, say)."Originally posted by The Awesome Berbaslug!!! View PostComment
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There was definitely a period there where the Tabloids didn't know who to hate, but september 11th sorted that out for them, and then the expansion of the EU helped sort them out, but I've got to say that the likes of the Sun and the Mail have been pumping out a pretty steady stream of xenophobia and anti-migrant garbage for a long time. The identity of the groups targeted changes over time, but not the mechanics of the whole thing.Comment
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I suggest you read my post again TAB, particularly the last bits, it is after all a long post and I can understand that it takes a while to digest.Comment
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Totally. They warmed up on 'Asylum seekers' in the late 90s (on which Labour were disgraceful) but 9/11 gave them a wonderful target. The 'immigration has gone mad' was always directed much more at Muslims from the Indian sub-continent post 9/11 much more than Poles or Romanians. They were crucial in linking the Islamophobia which didn't have a practical policy outlet to somehting that did that could be campaigned on and willed into existence in the form of Brexit.Comment
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Yes, that’s what I understood. I don’t know, I suspect it’s difficult to fully grasp the magnitude of Brexit (particularly the angle I've chosen in my long post and the one before with the Times article) if you don’t live in the UK and/or are not directly affected by it as I am, I probably tend to notice far more of this shit than the average person I suppose. But I do in France too, so it's not just the fact that I live here and Brexit affects me directly, well, so to speak.Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
The UK situation in this regard too is different from that of France or the US too I guess, the UK has traditionally been less exposed to that shit than you have or than the French have in the last 3 decades, say, you may remember my long posts on the French situation re the alt-right and the new reactionaries since the 1980s-90s:
https://www.onetouchfootball.com/sho...=1#post1412617
https://www.onetouchfootball.com/sho...=1#post1412620Comment
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Oh Your post is great. It's just that, that period of relative calm was from between the second IRA cease fire in 1996 and 2001. Even then it didn't go away, and instead people became more worried about Youth crime, which was code for Blacks and young working class people in general.Comment
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Oui Monsieur indeed....With the benefit of hindsight you could tell there was a discordance in the narrative of tolerance, but you were likely to brush it of and attribute it to a noisy minority, there was a Daily Mail or boorish, WW2 obession particularly in popular stuff like football but Brexit revealed a far bigger minority of silent head-nodders, happy to jump on the bandwagon when it came into town.
It must be unique for a country with such a jingoistic press to spend decades turning one of the most influential and powerful members of the EU into a poor victim, powerless and abused.Comment
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Bild and their fellow travelers were definitely ready to go that route if Bruxelles hadn't "seen reason" over Greece and austerity.
Of the genuinely terrifying, yet unifying, aspects of the "populist wave" is realising that that noisy minority we were all aware of, but preferred to ignore, could assemble the support of 52% of the electorate (or, in our case, a somewhat larger majority of the Electoral College).Comment
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May might be ready to agree an extension. Will the loons back home? Or the DUP?Originally posted by Diable Rouge View PostComment
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Extension is dependent on backstop agreement first. So still unacceptable to The Times Journalist, DUP inbred dirtbags, half the cabinet, possibly couthie Ruthie....Comment
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That’s what the most nakedly racist in terms of policy Home Sec since the 70s gets ya with her hostile environment shit. It’s almost laughable all the chickens coming home to roost with May and that Rasputin fuck Nick Timothy (is it the fuckin times employing that cunt?) except for what will happen next to the entire country.Originally posted by Nefertiti2 View PostComment
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Very hard though in Germany for a national ref to be held I believe, their constitution is not very accommodating:Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
A Frexit ref is equally hard too in France as I’ve explained on here before (full details here: https://www.20minutes.fr/economie/18...ossible-france) and in Belgium too I believe. Not sure about how easy/difficult it is in rest of the EU (well, we know how ridiculously easy it was for the UK to have one).https://www.dw.com/en/could-germans-...-eu/a-19365390
Germany's post-war constitution, however, does not easily allow for a binding nationwide referendum. Heidelberg-based lawyer Uwe Lipinski says Germans could only vote on exiting the EU if they first changed their constitution to include such "direct democracy" at the national level. Only then could the Berlin government or parliament call a referendum.Comment
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Well yes, but that wasn’t the point.
Italy is rather more legally friendly to plebiscites, though Renzi made the same mistake as Cameron on the last one.Comment
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When yr constitution is fuck all expect Westminster equals the Crown so equals Absolute power within ECHR rules, you can do whatever ya want. Like make all laws through Henry VIII clauses, remove devolved powers from the Celtic statelets, and there’s fuck all anyone can do about it. Cromwell was some cunt, almost as much for crushing the levellers as his killing fields in Ireland.Comment
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Oh I dream of bloodless UDI from starving no deal UKania .Comment
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