Psychoactive Substances: Rolling UK Politics in The Neo-Con Era

sheffield council sent me two postal ballots (they seem to be confused about whether i'm a postal voter or an overseas voter). i did the right thing.

shat on it

the wolfgang blau thing has a superficial plausibility but not a lot more. 'further integration' would either require treaty changes, which were politically possible only by engineering around rejected plebiscites even in a much more favourable climate a decade ago, or a slow accretion of measures in different areas. if the latter then the new recognition of british special pleading would probably enable this via further derogations when necessary.

the only further integration that is either sought or needed is within the eurozone rather than the eu architecture itself, which would be easier to accomplish once the uk exemption from eurozone refinancing is ratified. it's obtuse to claim that greece is opposed to further integration when it has spent years unsuccessfully pleading for eurozone debt consolidation/mutualization. nothing like this looks very likely for the time being in any case, but if a political will does develop then the uk precedent would allow a periphery of nordic/visegrad countries to self-segregate from eurozone fiscal integration (ie there is now already an actual germ for a two-tier eu).

in the case of exit, then the rest of the eu would be financially less exposed than the uk itself, but politically it could be a lot more difficult. there are comparable levels of resentment in many other countries and elections in several of them next year; insofar far as latin countries support further integration (still no more than a third of voters in any country) then it is in the hope that the solvent (=germanic) eurozone countries will consolidate with them. and any political will for that would lessen further once the uk left and the ordoliberal centre asserted itself against afd et al by clasping their lutheran prayerbooks and chastising the debtor nations.

and as sv says, it's not entirely clear how much difference 50.5% or 55% makes; the entire reactionary claim is about the will of the silent majority, and unpopular populists begin to look like born losers rather than mere unfortunates (cf the humiliation of farage last year). the snp are discussing a second referendum only in the eventuality of the uk leaving the eu, and insofar as they would have any other case to demand one, it is because the demographic trend is with them, rather than against as is the case for the overwhelmingly old and uneducated ukip vote.

the losers would continue making noise, effectively spoiling their ballots by voting ukip, but unless the conservative party decisively affirmed its opposition the eu, there would be no political constituency for it. this is possible, mostly because the ancient conservative party membership is even more estranged from the centre than the labour one, and if one of their two options was a hardcore eurosceptic they would buy it. whether the parliamentary party would give them another fundamentalist suicide candidate like i-d-s remains to be seen; northern ukip voters will not be voting for dominic raab.

I wonder to what degree places like fife, where I live and which has never returns a labour mp iirc (always Tory or ld/liberal) is because we fall between two stools? Everyone campaign in Edinburgh or Dundee, and that's maybe why the rural tends to be forgotten - it's more fri ing to campaign in cities. Mwhich may be circular.

(Was thinking after checking for nearby campaign events and not seeing any/few in my region.

I just read a facebook comment claiming an exit from the EU would more strongly ally Britain with the US

Is this a sentiment anyone is actually expressing? Because trust me, no one over here's saying that and we'd rather you stuck with the EU.

sounds like the dream of formalizing the anglosphere is picking up steam!

I just read a facebook comment claiming an exit from the EU would more strongly ally Britain with the US

Obama has already said it would not do so. But I guess he's leaving, so people are deluding themselves into thinking that he's wrong?

I feel like I could throw a rock and hit three thinkpieces on how Trump and Boris are similar but also not-similar (though I haven't read any because lifetime is finite).

the handful of US corporations who use Britain as a foothold to the EU are not on board with that!

just fwiw in case it solves anyone's problems ballots were only issued in the last ~month i think

yeah that Boris guy seems really dumb, if there's anything we can do on this side of the pond to help, let me know

I think we can handle this Trump thing but I'll send up a flare if we need assistance

Your government still regards Johnson as American for tax purposes, much to his annoyance.

I am normally conflicted on our enthusiastic taxation of citizens living abroad, but I feel this could be of use. Maybe we can get him extradited for tax evasion?

Put yer tin hats on before reading the most WTF thing I've read this year

" On the assassination of Jo Cox MP.

Posted on June 18, 2016 by Michael Shrimpton in Views & Letters // 36 Comments

"Ed: Some of our readers may find the following article controversial. We would therefore like to emphasise strongly that it is the personal opinion of the author.

I condemn this outrageous assassination in the strongest possible terms, and express my sympathy for Jo’s widower Brendan and their two young children, who are bound to be distraught. Sympathy for Brendan and the children however must not prevent serious analysis of this assassination. If we do not analyse it correctly, then poor Jo will have died in vain and other MPs may well pay the price in future.

MPs may be shocked and confused, but with respect they shouldn’t be. Assassination as a political weapon is associated primarily but not exclusively with German Intelligence, which tried to assassinate Queen Victoria three times and succeeded in assassinating Tsar Alexander II, Mahatma Gandhi and President John F. Kennedy, all the time staying deep, hiding behind political fanatics or so-called ‘lone gunmen’.

The failure to shut down Germany’s re-organised intelligence apparatus in 1945, as revealed in my book Spyhunter (June Press, 2014) condemned the Western World to over six decades of economic and political chaos. In order to get Britain into the EEC the new German agency London operation, GO2 (the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s fictional ‘OO’ section) assassinated Labour Leader Hugh Gaitskell MP in 1963. Gaitskell’s brutal assassination, using a bio-weapon developed by a team led by the German DVD’s Dr Josef Mengele, paved the way for the DVD’s Harold Wilson to take charge of the Labour Party. Wilson, of course, favoured British entry.

When Chancellor Iain Macleod opposed Germany’s entry terms in 1970 he too was murdered, by poison. GO2 went on to assassinate Ross McWhirter, a leading opponent of British membership, in 1975. That assassination was false-flagged via the Provisional IRA, a favoured German tactic, used again with the assassinations of Airey Neave in 1979 and Ian Gow in 1990, in each case in order to undermine Margaret Thatcher.

The next MP to be assassinated by GO2 was Leader of the Opposition John Smith, in 1994, after he told a Bilderberg Group meeting that he no longer supported euro membership. That nice man Jimmy Goldsmith, Leader of the Referendum Party, was assassinated using weaponised pancreatic cancer, in 1997. I met Jimmy not long before he died. I think he knew that he had been murdered.

Weaponised cancer – the Holy Grail of the Abwehr and DVD for many years – was again used in 2010, to assassinate my friend, the courageous investigative journalist Christopher Story FRSA. Christopher confirmed that he had been fatally poisoned in a poignant post on the night before he died.

All of these assassinations can be linked in some way to the EU. Ian Gow’s murder was a precursor to the internal party coup later that year against Margaret Thatcher, whom I also knew.

If the Remain side thought that only the pro-British side were vulnerable to assassination during this referendum campaign they overlooked two vital matters: the assassination of John Smith, who played a key role in organising the Labour rebellion in 1972, without which the ECA72 could never have been passed, and the assassination by the DVD of pro-EU Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh during the 2003 Swedish referendum on the euro.

John Smith’s assassination proved that loyalty counts for nothing so far as the DVD and GO2 are concerned. Anna Lindh’s cynical assassination was designed both to generate sympathy for the pro-euro side and to pin blame on the pro-Krona side.

There are some curious features of this latest assassination. Firstly, there is the mystery eye-witness who heard the accused man, Thomas Mair, shout ‘Britain first’, and the failure of West Yorkshire police to deny the existence of such a witness. It is now perfectly clear that there was no such eye-witness and improbable that Mair shouted the words attributed to him by irresponsible sections of the mainstream media, if that is not a tautology. This was a transparent attempt to smear Britain First, with whom Mair has no known association. Clearly they had nothing whatsoever to do with the assassination and were as shocked as everybody else.

Smearing right-wing organisations in this way is a standard tactic of German Intelligence. It was used effectively in the Oslo shooting, where one of the shooters, Anders Breivik, was portrayed as right-wing, although in fact he had no known affiliation with any right-wing organisation in Norway.

West Yorkshire’s investigation, such as it is, has been compromised from the get-go by the Acting Chief Constable, although in fairness she is probably being forced to work within tramlines set by the Cabinet Office, which in practice controls both the police and the Crown Prosecution Service. Like the equally useless Dallas Police before them, West Yorkshire are obsessing on the lone gunman theory before even a tenth of the evidence is in. It seems that one of the gunmen (Mair may not have fired a shot, of course, or more likely there were multiple shooters, as at Oslo) used a .38 calibre home-made gun, but from where did he acquire the ammunition? You can’t just walk into Argos and ask for a box of .38 Dum-Dum bullets.

There isn’t likely to be a trial. The standard tactic in this sort of case is a plea-bargain, with the defendant pleading not guilty by reason of insanity. It is not unknown for intelligence officers setting up the hit to make offers of cushy treatment. That was a feature of the Yorkshire Moors Murders, set up, again, by GO2.

The only way Parliament is likely to get at the truth is to take control and try Mair for his life at the Bar of Parliament. A State Trial and the death penalty would clearly be appropriate in this case. The assassination of poor Jo Cox was an assault upon our democracy.

My provisional assessment is that Jo Cox MP was taken out by one or more shooters recruited by GO2 in a reprise of the Lindh Tactic, in the hope of swinging the referendum in favour of Germany and the EU at the last minute. "

http://www.ukipdaily.com/assassination-jo-cox-mp/

Maybe it needs polled for most wtf line

and ffs don't read the comments!

or ignored, one of those
xp

http://metro.co.uk/2016/06/22/vote-leave-flew-a-plane-over-jo-cox-birthday-memorial-service-5960903/

oh ffs

A date for the fly past, over Westminster towards Tower Bridge, was made public last Friday before the memorial service had been arranged.
It was originally scheduled to take off at 12pm today but was delayed until 1pm and then 3.30pm because of adverse weather conditions.
It was organised by Britten-Norman Limited, independently of the official Vote Leave campaign.

so...this is basically a non-story then?

i was going to vote Brexit, for a bunch of subjective, more or less silly or not silly reasons, because i don't give too much of a shit about the whole proposition

and i was just walking home, thru the park the back of my house, and I saw a bunch of my East European neighbours, friends, people in the community, and i thought about the other EU nationals i work with or drink with or whatever else, and i realised fuck it, i'm voting Remain just because (maybe only because) i'm not metaphorically telling all those people to fuck off

guardian pollster on 538 this week basically said a) uk polls are worthless so who knows but b) he thinks it'll be close and he thinks it'll be remain bc when it's close ppl will tend to go w/ the status quo safer option

The thing that is currently freaking me out: if it is as close as it seems, in the event of a Remain victory the far right will continuously lobby (and possibly get) further referenda, but in the event of a Leave victory I bet everyone will drop the idea of another referendum because "the people have spoken".

Put yer tin hats on before reading the most WTF thing I've read this year

Terrifyingly insane

(fwiw i don't have any special inside information but i did call the michigan primary for bernie; i think remain is going to win and i don't think it'll be that close. but again i don't really know anything, it's just a gut feeling.)

the most accurate forecast prior to the 2015 was probably matt singh, afaik the only person who argued the conservative vote was being underestimated via some quite acute statistical work

http://www.ncpolitics.uk/2015/05/polls-wrong-initial-postmortem.html/

his current forecast is 37% leave

http://www.ncpolitics.uk/2016/06/forecast-update-the-last-lap.html/

and there's some suggestion for a similar underestimation of the remain vote in the polling because leave voters are disproportionately easy to contact by pollsters

http://www.economist.com/blogs/bagehot/2016/06/eu-referendum-polling

though even the most sanguine forecasts would estimate approximately 30% chance the uk leaves, so whilst there is a clear favourite it could quite easily go the other way

NV, I have yet to read a full accounting of what the transition would look like, but wouldn't Britain exiting the EU not really metaphorically be telling EU nationals to fuck off? I'd imagine there would be a fair amount of paperwork to apply for foreign resident worker status, although not nearly as many hoops as there are to jump through for foreign workers in the US. I'd imagine a fair number would get rejected, or leave due to the process.

I've read a few conversations elsewhere on the web where EU residents were starting to hedge their employment by looking around for jobs in mainland Europe in case their British residency situation became tenuous.

When the US diminished the number of work visas a number of years ago I had a few coworkers who went to college here, worked here for a couple years, and were forced to move home due to their visas not being renewed. It was annoying, because a bunch of them were people that had been interns or employees in positions the department had a hard time filling.

Wow that does sound really annoying how did u cope

Anyone currently living here would probably be ok whatever happens. They would have to stay here and could lose the right to return if they left for any extended period, iirc. The non-resident family members of resident EU citizens would probably find it much more difficult to join them.

If the UK leaves but wanted to have access to European markets like Norway does there is a reasonable possibility that free movement might be the cost of that.

However, the UK does have an extremely strict and inflexible immigration system for non-EU workers and the risk that it could be extended to new entrants from Europe is significant given that immigration seems to be the only thing the majority of leave voters care about. The government has already committed to unrealistic immigration cuts and a new government, even further to the right, would probably try to follow through on some of that. Most new EU migrants would not be eligible for working visas if the current rules applied to them.

the factuality of Britain exiting the EU could be any of a number of things because nobody knows how it would pan out and everybody who claims to is a liar but symbolically it will be a "fuck off" and practically i don't want to feel even notionally responsible for anything that amounts to repatriation

Is there a good explanation of which areas the UK would be able to "take back" control over if they went for a Norway-like/EEA status?

If out does end up meaning completely out, I wouldn't be surprised if some categories of already-resident EU nationals were forced to apply for permission to stay. The Tories do love a points system, it would be a shame not to use it.

on the other hand there's a few more hours for me to react badly to getting hectored by middle class liberals so who knows

:(

not a jab at anybody here in case that wasn't clear, just the whole stinking tone of this thing

"reacting badly" probably behind 99% of votes [either way] I expect

i've got an EEA-4 that lasts til 2022 so i figure they can't exactly "cancel" that? even if i took off to live in hawaii for a year? (mmmm hawaii)

Wow that does sound really annoying how did u cope

― Daithi Bowsie (darraghmac), Wednesday, June 22, 2016 3:32 PM (29 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

rough times, darragh. rough times.

anyone watching this circus on c4

Can't bring myself to do so, I know how I'm voting and it'll just upset me.

a host of guests including Admiral Lord West, Alan Johnson MP, Alastair Campbell, Alex Salmond MP, Professor Germaine Greer, June Sarpong, Katy Brand, Lee McQueen, Leslie Ash and Lord Heseltine

jesus fucking christ no

Anyone currently living here would probably be ok whatever happens

― On a Raqqa tip (ShariVari), Wednesday, 22 June 2016 21:34 (16 minutes ago)

there's no reason to be sanguine about this given that 75% of current eu immigrants would not qualify under the general criteria and most of those are from post-2004 accession countries. quite how a paranoid political movement that had derived its success from resentment of eastern europeans would tolerate their continued presence is unclear.

Right. If there is a clear Brexit majority it will be hard to dispute that there is a mandate to "do something".

(xxxp) Lee McQueen is dead... surely?

LOL, it's not Alexander McQueen, it's some Apprentice guy.

lee rigby and steve mcqueen (the actor) are dead
idk who lee mcqueen is but if he was alive when that press release was written then he probably is not dead now

Don't know, it's been a tough campaign.

toss-up for most pointless contribution is currently between wetherspoons dude, katie price, and a lady I don't recognise whose argument for Leave is genuinely 'but what about the baby lambs'

sandy shaw is not really helping things

Were you thinking of a smiths album perhaps?