the day after the deadline: can the union survive brexit and other deep questions

this seems relevant to Fred's interests re the poisonings and Corbyn's foreign policy

The British government, led by the Tories, has shown itself more than willing to permit this money laundering because it has disproportionately benefited the upper crust of UK society. Billions have been brought into the London-based banking industry, propping up a massive expansion of the City’s financial services industry. Property rents in London’s neighborhoods have skyrocketed as the corrupt money is protected in British real estate, pushing out middle and working class people for oligarch’s vacation homes or to act as “gold bricks” for investment. To protect this, Russia’s nouveau riche lobby Tory politicians to the tune of £820,000 to preserve the status quo. Meanwhile London now serves as the “de-facto capital of the post-Soviet mafia state.”

Corbyn and the Labour Party have done much to bring these facts to the forefront of British policy-making, but the remarks of his office this week miss the links between Russian president Vladimir Putin’s powerbase and British money laundering. Instead, his comments focused on the slight possibility that Russia had lost control of the nerve agent in the 1990s, allowing mafia or rogue members of the state to use it for these purposes. Corbyn’s spokesman echoed these comments, saying that that it was still unclear if Russia was behind the attacks.

Corbyn’s comments have drawn predictably strong rebukes from the Tories, as well as his own party. But Corbyn’s (and his detractors’) comments miss the obvious connection to the greater fight against global oligarchy. As Leonid Ragozin wrote in a later tweet, reforming Russia means reforming the West, and obfuscating Russia’s involvement only distracts from Labour’s (and the Left’s in general) vision for a more equitable society.

https://fellowtravelersblog.com/2018/03/16/the-skripal-poisonings-and-the-chance-to-build-a-left-foreign-policy/

That is not too badly wrong, the rest of the article goes off the rails a bit. Russia is not the problem, it’s as true of extracted wealth in Nigeria, India, Uzbekistan, etc, etc. It ends up here. The Magnitsky act is arbitrary/ partial and hasn’t stopped much Russian wealth going to the US. This is, to some extent, not even a foreign policy question.

Wealthy people invest / settle here for a variety of reasons that aren’t directly related to the government being particularly compliant (which is not to say they aren’t). It’s an English-speaking country with access to the rest of Europe, the court system is stable and largely uncorrupted, expensive private schools and state universities are very good, the housing problem makes investments in property reasonably stable, it’s one of the world’s biggest transport hubs, etc, etc. None of that is likely to change.

There are certainly easy things the government can do to make it slightly harder for people to sink illegally extracted money into the country - stronger use of Unexplained Wealth Orders, enforcing fines on illegal use of land trusts, which are rarely ever collected, stoping the practice of giving automatic residency to people investing £5m+, etc but that’s tinkering at the margins. In many, probably most, cases wealth that was originally tied to criminality and corruption is fairly ‘clean’ now. You might discourage the regional governor taking a few million in bribes but not the billionaires bribing them. Anything the UK does, at the moment, would also be unlikely to stop people sinking their money into Malta or Cyprus and still sending their kids to Eton, buying flats in Knightsbridge, etc.

Corbyn is likely to be a major disincentive in himself, simply because the reputation of the UK as a country that doesn’t do politics might go away, but the key things we need to do are equally targeted at the British rich, rather than simply a handful of foreigners. We need to start taxing wealth, not just income, and end the use of blind trusts, dummy corporations, etc to hide money behind. You can make the country a much less attractive place simply through normal soc dem policies.

Nick Robinson: "(in Russia) the state media is entirely rigged". That sounds like a real problem.

windmill jolyon speaks

Just remembered I have a written message from a senior BBC bod explaining (unambiguously) that the BBC does code negative messages about Corbyn into its imagery.

— Jo Maugham QC (@JolyonMaugham) March 18, 2018

I saw an interesting suggestion yesterday that Putin's project for the next six years might be to build a stable system, outwardly looking like 'liberal democracy', in which power cycles between different groups every few year but nothing fundamentally changes, which seemed familiar.

thank god there is ppl like Applebaum in the free world to denounce this sham democracy :p

I had missed the windmill thing somehow; I gain new appreciation for the fine work of Simon Hedges every day.

The Jolyon thing is both intriguing and ridiculous, I think the best thing I saw was someone accusing his account of having being hacked as they couldn’t believe he’d defend Corbyn.

The BBC and Jeremy Corbyn https://t.co/ISQxPI7fF3

— Jo Maugham QC (@JolyonMaugham) March 19, 2018

Hitchens is also sticking up for Corbyn and said he is near enough the only person in parliament without a "questionable record" on foreign affairs.

b-b-but corbyn spoke to a dodgy czech once and has been in the pocket of big czech ever since!

Big Czech is my favorite fake grime artist

https://groceries.morrisons.com/productImages/120/120156011_0_640x640.jpg?identifier=2c105819dcd2ecdb18c17cb18574a11c
not boasting, but I have downed a lot of Big Czechs in my time.

aka the Pilsdowner

Hitchens often sticks up for Corbyn.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/29/11/8d/29118d4bb5e2ad88fb159086ae8e746a.gif

This fucking weasel meanwhile.

https://www.politicshome.com/news/uk/defence/military-campaigns/news/93659/excl-jacob-rees-mogg-calls-permanent-uk-base-baltics

Since the referendum, the Government have made at least seven major promises about the transition period. Today’s draft agreement with the EU shows these promises have all now been broken, and that all transition does is move us from being a rule maker to a rule taker.

https://www.open-britain.co.uk/background_briefing_seven_broken_promises_on_transition?utm_source=t.co&utm_medium=referral

i'm all for jacob rees-mogg being stationed in the baltics as a first-defence strategy tbh, perhaps permanently strapped to the nose of an icbm to show putin he means business

i support basing Jacob Rees Mogg in the Balkans forever

lol snap

that cunt Mogg is not really living in the 19th century like some jest, he is still in the 1920 period of delusional neo-colonialism, really I think.

it’s extremely good that h3l3n l3wis is writing a book*

*because it means you don’t have to listen to her on the NS podcast

unfortunately she is still writing her column. this week’s is truly abysmal

Fucking hell it's awful:

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2018/03/immigration-gender-left-avoiding-hard-work-persuasion

It's easy to mock the idea of "legitimate concerns" -

fun, too

I've got an actually good article to share in response the JR-M thing but let's get this out of the way. This thing that people nominally on the left do when they disparage "the left", when they're taking their entire cue from social media.

See also "identity politics".

it's handy when your enemies out themselves tbh

but it's weird how, the more legitimate the concern, the more it seems to come down to moaning about Corbyn/Momentum/woke Twitter/all those shiftless kids who can't be bothered to do the necessary work of sitting round in committee rooms chatting shit for 3 hours a night like proper politicians do

It’s legit impressive in an era of dwindling print media and online advertising resources that you can maintain an entire career by writing articles about why the hundred or so people who critically engage with you on Twitter are bad and awful.

She's still young, Helen Lewis, her journey's end as a Janet Daley or a Melanie Phillips could still be some time off.

Ditum will get there first, I think.

Anyway this is actually worth reading:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n05/william-davies/what-are-they-after

What do they want, these Brexiteers? The fantasies of hardliners such as Liam Fox, Daniel Hannan and Jacob Rees-Mogg are based on dimly learned lessons from British history. The mantra of ‘Global Britain’ resurrects an ideal of laissez-faire from the era of Manchester cotton mills and New World slavery. Discussing the range of Brexit options at a Tory Conference fringe event in October, the former Brexit minister David Jones concluded: ‘If necessary, as Churchill once said, very well then, alone.’ This is the sort of nostalgia Stuart Hall warned against as early as the 1970s, and which Peter Ammon, the outgoing German ambassador in London, identified recently when he complained that Britain was investing in a vision of national isolation that Churchill had played up (and vastly exaggerated) in his wartime rhetoric.

Do they even believe the myth, or is it an expedient way of bashing opponents while pursuing some ulterior goal? Historical re-enactment may be fine for the Daily Mail and the grassroots, but it doesn’t seem a strong enough motivation to support a professional political career. We need to know not just what kind of past the Brexiteers imagine, but what kind of future they are after. One disconcerting possibility is that figures such as Fox and Rees-Mogg might be willing to believe the dismal economic forecasts, but look on them as an attraction.

JR-M's Russian boner fits right in with this.

JR-M's Russian boner

noooooo

that helen lewis article tho, wtf

i can't even unwrap what point she's making - that yeah immigration actually has helped the uk and hasn't driven down wages but the left aren't very nice about pointing it out on twitter and anyway voters are too stupid to care either way but nevertheless something something terfs and then transgender people in sport and that's what i did in my holidays thanks miss may i sit down now please

Yeah Matt, I found that piece very helpful too - I'd never really "gotten" the tories going against their own interests via brexit, couldn't really think that it would come down to something as basic as short-sighted careerism and not something more sinister, but this article makes a good case:

It would be almost reassuring to know that there was an ideology of Tory Brexit that was driving things, just as there is an ideology known as ‘Lexit’ which views the EU as an anti-democratic neoliberal institution that must be resisted. But for the generation who entered public life in the 1990s, after the ‘end of ideology’, there were only two choices: to devote oneself with immense earnestness to the nitty-gritty of policy and economics, or to revel in the freedom of symbolism and storytelling, as journalists, PR professionals and pranksters. Political careers came later.

Ditum, Lewis et al are useful illustrations of the often missed middle steps between “having a cause” and “full blown fanaticism”. Have they had anything to say about people like Dawn Foster getting violent rape threats from anti-trans activists, does anyone know?

Meanwhile, the last polls I saw had Labour with an 18 point lead with women. It tells a lot that the proposal to amend the GRA comes from the Tories, but they’re targeting Labour.

They also loooooove dogwhistling about the “hard left” which is consistently portrayed by them as a monolith who never disagree or argue. Goes without saying that this crowd loves their tone arguments. If anything it’s an amorphous alliance of diverse causes and people - whereas #fbpe and #labourlosingwomen are incredibly white and middle-class.

Owned on and offline:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/03/dawn-butler-spoiled-one-of-the-best-days-of-my-life/

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4044728/amp/Theresa-wants-use-army-computerised-Trump-mind-readers-help-win-Election.html?__twitter_impression=true

really just for amazing headline

Young ruined his own day by not having the courage to defend his own vile shtick, and knowing he would have been completely owned in a public place if he had dared say shit! I wish his day had been truly ruined, like some offensive chant about daddy making his brat cry or something.

QPR have some vile fans. Apart from m.i.a. ILXer RTC of course.

I mean fwiw if I was in Young's position, believing I was right, I too think not making a scene about this at a footie thing honoring my kid would be the right thing to do.

Writing an article afterwards bragging about it, not so much.

true, but if he wasn't such an inflammatory type of controv-merchant, playing to the gallery most of the time. He might not have a paranoia about getting his arse kicked in irl situations. Tbh, if he had just gone out there with the brat, Dawn would have probably kept it civil.

Absolutely phenomenal: Neil Hamilton has complained that the BBC only found anti-Brexit school kids for a feature, and the 9-year old children "gave childish answers" pic.twitter.com/39hudRyYrW

— Dawn Foster (@DawnHFoster) March 20, 2018

This generation are #Uber-riding #Airbnb-ing #Deliveroo-eating #freedomfighters

— Elizabeth Truss (@trussliz) March 19, 2018

QPR

QPR

QP Ahahahahahaha

ur not meant to eat the deliveroo

Tweet hasn't exactly gone down to well, judging by the replies.

Good timing, uber have just killed someone with their self driving cars

— Liam Doyle (@Doyle_liam) March 19, 2018