This England

You used to know where you stood, often quite literally. Entering a busy fish and chip shop, where people waited for various nowadays incomprehensible orders, there was a certain Englishness in the calm order in which matters were dealt with; first come, first served, elders to the front of the queue. Ah the queue, for which we were once famous throughout the world, the very epitome of fairness and egalitarianism.

We didn’t need an identity in the modern sense, for we all had one already and one with far stronger bonds than the myriad fractured hierarchies of grievance to be found today in the relative pain rankings of gender, sexuality, race, learning needs and disability. It was once considered impolite to talk about politics or religion but nowadays we have little else – and some religions are legally off-limits. So all we have left is politics... and the weather, although even the weather is now fraught with difficulty depending on how far down the climate change rabbit hole you have ventured.

But the biggest division today is, of course, Brexit. And it is a division which shows so much about how far we have travelled since the chip shop days. If you are older and still have a sense of the common bond of Englishness (and I do mean English as opposed to British; British is no longer an easy and reassuring identifier) you will likely have voted to try and regain that enviable status. If you are young and have been brought up to believe that the source of all that is good is somewhere else, you are probably a remainer.

If you are an older Brexiteer you are probably a little confused and certainly dismayed at the disdain the young show for a thousand years of modern history. If you are young you are probably furious at the nasty, crusty old leavers who have, in the current parlance, ‘stolen your future’. If you are young, of course, you also know nothing that others haven’t told you... you don’t even realise this fully because, as young people, you still need to be protected from your illogical and self-destructive urges.

We used to do that, we ‘old people’. Nobody voted to make your lives poorer, we voted to make all our lives more meaningful. You may not see a problem in globalism, blasphemy laws, unlimited, unchecked migration, Ponzi welfare systems and the culture of self above all else, but we do. You will still be able to spread your wings, travel the world, see wonders and better yourselves. Having, maybe, to put the tiniest bit more effort into it might be the making of you. But in or out, what you become has always been in your hands; nobody has taken that from you.

And when you’ve made something worthy of yourself, when you are yourself sitting back and taking stock of your life, we hope that one day you will appreciate: “This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands,--This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”

No need to thank us.

Swamp Creatures

Interesting times, indeed. If anybody was in any doubt about whether electing Donald Trump, or voting for Brexit was the right choice Parliament appears to be bending over backwards to provide example after example of how it exists to serve itself and defy the unfortunate chance of protocol which has saddled it with an electorate to bamboozle. In a proper system of government, they seem to indicate, we would have no need to appease the untermenschen who have somehow been given airs and graces beyond their entitlement. You can imagine the conversations behind closed doors:

“Look here, little people, every five years we let you pretend to have a say and then we let you get back to grubbing about for scraps, or whatever frightful collection of activities passes for a meaningful existence in your world. Honestly, some of you have neither title nor political dynasty to speak of yet you think you know best?

“Sometimes we blame ourselves, you know, if more of you were living on the breadline you’d have better things to worry about than whether or not we had national identity, dignity and pride. What is the point of pride, for heaven’s sake. I mean look what that oik Churchill did with it. He managed to rouse a rabble of common rough people to take up arms and thwart our dear friends’ plans for European Unity.

“Well, we’re not allowing that to happen again. Tony Blair did his bit to swamp the country with so much islamic monocultural ‘diversity’ we’d rather hoped you would have been outbred by now. But no; that’s the problem with low intellect – you have a stubbornness which defies logic. Our logic. We in the EU – of course we are fully signed up to perpetual union, you idiots - were busy trying to plan a secret army to cope with any uprisings and what do you bloody well do? You go and commit Brexit, that’s what. Well, it is sodding well not going to happen on our watch and if necessary we will take the entire country down with us.

“As opposed to what Anna Soubry said about her overblown 'Nazi' incident, where we are now is not just a few horrible people being nasty to MPs, it is millions of you. You can’t imagine quite how horrible it is, seeing your ugly, lower caste, gurning faces massing at the gates of Westminster Palace, imagining that your vote is as valid as ours...”

How Westminster see voters...

It still beggars belief that MPs don’t seem to fully understand the levels of frustration, anger and downright mistrust that exist in the population at large. Voiceless, powerless and now that we know how much we are despised, utterly disgusted at the system that has brought us here. Donald Trump likes to talk about draining the swamp in Washington; well Westminster is no different. A referendum didn’t help one bit; we’re going to need a bigger plunger.

Brexit-proof

A Sky poll has revealed 98% of people who voted to remain in the EU are stockpiling in preparation for a no-deal departure. In contrast, the morons who voted to leave are sleepwalking blindly to the cliff edge abyss of a chaotic, catastrophic, cataclysmic, no-meal Brexit, says the impartial establishment.

In Cornwall, Hysteria Panic-Attack and her family have been buying extra food and supplies since last summer to make sure she is prepared. She tells Sky News why she is doing it.

“A no-deal Brexit will result in a complete end of access to a whole range of products and services, some, maybe for a short time, but most will be gone forever. As a parent, I make no apology for protecting my children from the stupidity of the bovine leave-voting saboteurs who voted to abandon our precious nirvana on Earth.

When we realised that Brexit was to happen we were fucking outraged. When we realised that a no-deal scenario was not only possible but likely we knew we were seeing the beginning of World War Three. The first thing we did was some light research and everywhere we looked all we could see was the rise of the far right. After seeing just the tip of the iceberg, and only in layman's terms, we decided that Brexit was, literally, Hitler.

The realisation that the neo-Nazis of the hard right were mobilising became clearer in the autumn of 2017. At the time my husband and I had already been discussing the ramifications of Brexit. We knew that we needed to fight back and organise a resistance, to which end we decided make some small preparations as a family. We moved house last summer, away from the city to a small gated compound where we could stockpile food and ammunition against the deprivations to come.

Realising that almost everything we regarded as essentials would become luxury goods after Brexit we started hoarding common household medicines, toiletries (because so many of us have sensitive skin and require special types of shampoo and shower gel) cigarettes and alcohol to use as currency in the coming black market. French wine, for one, will be worth its weight in gold come the summer. And Prosecco; in fact we have dug and stocked a 100 cubic metre cellar from floor to ceiling with the precious stuff.

We installed solar panels, a methane digester and reverse osmosis water purifier because we know that after Brexit there will be no more electricity or clean water. And we decided to become completely self-sufficient, like Tom and Barbara in The Good Life, which is especially auspicious because our next-door neighbours are called Jeremy and Margaret, which is close enough. We have also begun digging the foundations of our machine gun emplacement.

Because, as time went on and no-deal Brexit became more and more of a possibility and we learnt more and more about the real life implications, we realised that we would need to defend our compound against marauding hordes of filthy Brexiteers who, we knew, would turn into ravenous zombies instantly on the 30th March 2019. We have dug several ditches lined with sharpened and poisoned spikes and laid trip wires everywhere. Come Brexit Day nobody will be able to enter or leave our community of brave freedom fighters without risking death or horrible injury.

We will be ready when they come...

People routinely spend money on home insurance they hope never to have to use, but they have it for peace of mind, to protect themselves and their families just in case. Our preparations for a no-deal Brexit are no different. We have taught our children how to dead-rope a zombie, catch and skin and butcher wild animals for clothes and food and to shun as a deadly enemy anybody they suspect may have the slightest sympathy with leavers. It is what any sane, rational survivor would do."

Causelation

Once again the empty vessels ring out as they revisit knife crime, police numbers and demonstrate their inability –deliberate or otherwise – to  differentiate between causation and correlation. For instance, it is a demonstrable fact that everybody who ever died of cancer was once born thus there is a 100% correlation between getting cancer and being born; the clear fallacy which follows is, of course that cancer is caused by being born, a proposition you can often refute by trying to apply the causation in reverse.

If the sun rises every day and every day there are far more accidents as people drive to work than there are accidents in the dead of night, does this mean that daylight is the chief cause of road traffic accidents? This echoes the old saw that if 20% of road accident fatalities are caused by drunken drivers, the other 80% must be the fault of the sober, so let’s all get pissed and save lives. This isn’t to say that the reduction in police numbers is not somehow linked to knife crime but, as always, a simplistic view makes for far better headlines than doing some solid research.

Everywhere you look people who should (and often do) know better are causing mischief by misusing statistics to tell a story often only peripherally related to those statistics. And depending on from whose mouth the accusations fly the indignation of various groups are triggered. Thus, when Hate-not-Hope[sic] target and intimidate Tommy Robinson’s wife and kids the left, from their lofty moral steeds, insist that all’s fair, yet when it happens to one of their own – Mike Stuchbery, Rachael Cousins – it is somehow due to the rise of the far right.

Oh yes, we’re back to all that. Latest in the attempts to smear ordinary, everyday, majority concerns as extremist is Sayeeda (Baroness, no less) Warsi who states, as evidence of deep embedded islamophobia, that Conservatives have retweeted messages in support of Tommy (not his real...) Robinson. Now I’m not one to start a conspiracy theory, but how convenient would it be for them if attention were to be distracted away from Labour’s anti-Semitism row? Seriously, though, are we to believe that our major political divide is now between islam and judaism? So much for the christian soldiers.

But back to islamophobia. Phobia; fear. When, across the globe, people are being regularly beheaded, lashed, stoned, burned and thrown from buildings and this is earnestly claimed to be the will of allah, is it not prudent to fear such events becoming commonplace? And given the inability of moderate muslims to bring about any cessation of such hostilities, openly declare their allegiance to the umma above all, isn’t it a pretty reasonable reaction to exercise caution in trusting people who identify by religion – any religion - first?

Above all, don't believe it 

because it was on Facebook!

How do we deal with all the bullshit, which is woven through all media everywhere? It’s simple, really. Next time somebody trots out a lazy factoid – like a fact, but only superficially so – challenge it. Assume every news story is simply a version of the truth and that all out of context words, actions, numbers and even images can be and often are employed to tell a story quite different from the actual events. Keep an open mind but question everything, but most of all ask yourself, what really happened here... and who benefits from the version being told?

Duplicitous leaders

 This is a copy of the blog post on the Bruges Group website,  which has very quickly been taken down. I am hosting it here simply for visibility. I make no claims about its accuracy.

John Petley 

 

 Tuesday, 05 March 2019

 

There is no doubt about the veracity of this account since documents have been seen.

On Monday July 9th 2018, several leading French, German and Dutch senior managers were called by EU officials to an urgent meeting.

The meeting was said to be private and those present were informed that Prime Minister May and Chancellor Merkel had reached an Agreement over Brexit. Knowledge of this was attained from the actual transcript of the meeting between May and Merkel.

1) The Agreement was couched in a way to 'appease' the Brexit voters.

2) The Agreement would enable May to get rid of those people in her party who were against progress and unity in the EU.

3) Both Merkel and May agreed that the likely course of events would be that UK would re-join the EU in full at some time after the next general election.

4) May agreed to keep as many EU laws and institutions as she could despite the current groundswell of 'anti-EU hysteria' in Britain (May's own words, apparently.)

5) Merkel and May agreed that the only realistic future for the UK was within the EU.

The original Agreement draft was completed in May 2018 in Berlin and then sent to the UK Government Cabinet Office marked 'Secret'.

NB This Agreement draft was authored in the German Chancellor's private office.

The Cabinet returned the Agreement draft with suggestions, and there was some to-ing and fro-ing during June 5th 2018.

Private calls between the Prime Minister and Chancellor were made.

The Agreement's final draft came out late in June 2018. The German Chancellor told Prime Minister May that this was a deal she would support, though there would need to be some more small concessions by the UK to keep the EU happy.

The Chancellor and Prime Minister met in Germany. Merkel had this meeting recorded as a 'private meeting' though the Prime Minister was probably unaware of that.

The Chancellor had the transcript of that meeting circulated secretly to EU and key German embassies.

Conclusions

Documents make it quite clear that Prime Minister May was negotiating with Germany, not the EU.

The transcript also makes it clear that the Prime Minister intended to keep all this secret from minsters, especially the Brexit group.

She wants to keep as many EU institutions in UK as intact as possible in order to facilitate an easy return to the EU after 2020.

Chancellor Merkel briefed May on tactics to force Cabinet approval.

The Prime Minister and senior civil servants were working with Germany to stop Brexit or water it down to prevent free trade and the ending of freedom of movement, but to keep cash flowing to the EU.

David Davis was kept in the dark while key EU premiers in France, Holland and Ireland were briefed in full.

Key EU heads were actually briefed in full the day before the Cabinet meeting at Chequers.