The Political Thread

[Frank]

I don't agree with Tankie, but the last couple of pages are this board at its ugliest. Stick to discussing facts, rather than making pointless personal attacks.

[The Legendary Shark]

Stick to discussing facts, rather than making pointless personal attacks.

Hear, hear.

[GordonR]

*and for what it's worth, I think Tankie is a good-natured sort but I'm not satisfied with his answers either.

No, neither am I, primarily because the entire Leave campaign was a series of lies, so it's almost impossible for anyone to defend the decision on the basis of facts: most honest Leavers should  just say the idea of foreigners touching their stuff makes them feel queasy and leave it at that.

But I do think Tankie was entitled to head off to bed at 1.30am without being called a stirrer.

But we're still waiting from yesterday lunchtime for him to answer Jim's point on how he can be so concerned about the sovereignty of the UK and so strangely unconcerned about the prospect of the UK subsequently breaking up.

[Old Tankie]

And, I am supposed to be the wind up merchant!!??

[IAMTHESYSTEM]

'The people have spoken, the bastards.' Dick Tuck Democratic candidate for senator in 1966 and we find ourselves facing a very uncertain future with Brexit and a thin, skinned successionist moron in the White House. The left and right seem polarized and also unable to offer anything but hopeless hang wringing despite claims of 'resistance' against the isolationist trend. It seems large numbers of people quietly loathed the Globalist order and they're all being thrown out of office across the world. That more integrated world recedes before us and a more puritan based Nationalism hovers into view with all the potential ugliness that might entail. We're seeing the possible defeat of one world view and it's replacement by another perhaps less tolerant one but that's that I'm afraid. The things we thought were certainties turned out to be phantoms, those implacable ideologies puffed out into smoke and in a suddenly uncertain world, people look to the past for order. So you'd better prepare yourself for a lot less multi- culturalism and a lot more White Anglo-Saxon Protestant which may not be very welcome in some parts.

     

[Frank]

The Invisible Hand


Robert Mercer, a hedge-fund billionaire, who helped to finance the Trump campaign and who was revealed this weekend as one of the owners of the rightwing Breitbart News Network, directed his data analytics firm to provide expert advice to the Leave campaign on how to target swing voters via Facebook.

Cambridge Analytica, which has 25 years' experience in military disinformation campaigns and "election management", claims to use cutting-edge technology to build intimate psychometric profiles of voters to find and target their emotional triggers.

The strategy involved harvesting data from people's Facebook and other social media profiles and then using machine learning to "spread" through their networks. The campaign used this information, combined with artificial intelligence, to decide who to target with highly individualised advertisements and had built a database of more than a million people, sending thousands of different versions of advertisements to people depending on what it had learned of their personalities..

Mercer and his daughter Rebekah are emerging as key figures in the ascendancy of Trump and the strategic disruption of the mainstream media. A brilliant computer scientist who did pioneering work at IBM in AI, Mercer made billions with Renaissance Technologies, a hedge-fund that specialises in automated trading.

As well as financing Trump's campaign, he encouraged Trump to take on two key advisers – Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway – and on Saturday the Washington Post revealed him as one of the owners of Breitbart. Bannon's role within the Trump administration is being increasingly examined but, until now, Mercer's connection has escaped the same sort of close scrutiny – particularly with regard to the media.

Breitbart, which has become the leading platform for the alt-right, is only one of a series of investments that aim to change the media landscape and political views not just in the US but also in Britain. A British version of Breitbart was launched in 2014, Bannon told the New York Times, explicitly to try to influence the upcoming general election.

Until now, however, it was not known that Mercer had explicitly tried to influence the outcome of the EU referendum.

[Jim_Campbell]

Hear, hear.

Worth pointing out again that I am genuinely interested to understand on what basis Leave supporters blithely assert that things will turn out OK. I have outlined in some detail the seemingly inevitable collapse of sterling to somewhere below parity with the dollar; the impact on the UK economy of losing the City of London's passporting privileges; the implications for the Good Friday Agreement; and I have yet to hear one cogent response (here, or anywhere else for that matter) as to why these things won't play out as predicted, or what might be done to mitigate those things. Or, failing that, a single tangible benefit would be nice, and we haven't heard any of those, either.*

Tankie keeps saying 'I've explained, let's just agree to disagree' but I haven't heard anything to disagree with. The Leave voters have locked us all into a course of action that seems, to me, be an insane path to economic ruination and I don't think it's unfair to ask someone from their side of this argument to explain to me why it's all going to be OK.

*Note, for example, that Tankie's objection to VAT appears to be that the EU has some control over setting the bands at which it's chargeable. He accepts that leaving the EU won't get rid of VAT, or even see it cut, he just objects to the notional idea that the UK government doesn't have 100% control over how it is applied.

[Mikey]

Hey TLS - judging by the pm you sent me, I suspect that you think I called in the Mods about our spat. I can assure you I didn't. Also, I'd have been more than happy to respond here if you had put it on the thread, so...

Hi Mikey,

I'm sorry you're so upset.

There is no point continuing our discussion on the Political Thread - one cannot address an emotional argument with a rational one so I'm not even going to try.

All the best to you.

TLS.[\quote]

Unfortunately, that attitude to the issues in Northern Ireland and their lasting effect on people is one I've encountered more than once over the years and, I admit, informed my own responses up thread.

I'll use the ignore function and do my best to steer away in future sure.

[The Legendary Shark]

Mikey, I have had no communication from any mods and therefore did not think you had called on them at all.

I PM'd you because you were obviously getting very upset and thought it best to try and defuse the situation in private rather than continuing at what seemed to be cross-purposes. I can see how upsetting my opinions are to you over what my government did in your country, things that make me ashamed and add fuel to my opinion that governments rely on violence and are therefore illegitimate.

I admit that my understanding of what happened over there is inadequate, based largely on the fact that for many years the only information I got was from the biased British media.

If you want to put me straight on the facts then please do so - I might be blunt but I'm not a monster.

[Hawkmumbler]

Tankers gets his political insight the same place a lot of Leavers do.

Off the side of a bus.

But I think what people here are doing is pushing Tankie for a reasonable explanation*, in order to understand the Leave vote, rather than dividing the public even further with sweeping generalisations like this.  Sorry, but I just don't think it helps matters one bit.

*and for what it's worth, I think Tankie is a good-natured sort but I'm not satisfied with his answers either.

Well the intentions behind my post where purely for the sake if a self undulgent laugh at Leavers expense but I cant say I completely disagree despite finding Tankers answer dodging enfuriating on the Alistair Campbell level. It all smacks a little if Leavers covering their ears and repeating the same half a dozen lies in order to try and force them into reality.

Bah.

[The Legendary Shark]

Interesting article, Frank. It seems to indicate how the Powers That Shouldn't Be are using their wealth and influence to get what they want irrespective of the wishes or situation of the great unwashed. (See also George Soros, who makes billions from chaos (as when he broke the Bank of England in 1992) and is now funding the refugee crisis in Europe (his Open Society Foundations were also apparently responsible for printing the "Welcome to the EU" refugee handbooks found on Lesbos in 2015 by Sky News). Of course, his goals can only be guessed at - but the chaos stirred up by rampant immigration, both real and imagined, presents a man used to profiting from disaster, and who wants sovereign governments to fail so larger globalist institutions (like the EU) can take their place, a great many financial opportunities.)

[Frank]

Shami Chakrabarti's taking pelters for blaming the weather, telly, and public transport for Labour missing out on a clean sweep at the by-elections, but nobody else has an answer to why a vulnerable and divided Tory party are having such an easy time of it.

Whatever you think the answer is, the UK's been operating without a functional opposition for almost a decade. That isn't good news for any democracy.

[Modern Panther]

Audiences at Scottish Labour conference is embarrassing.  Whilst the SNP fill stadiums, Scottish Labour have a half empty theatre.  And how do Labour plan on winning over these SNP voters?  By calling them all racists.

[Frank]

Audiences at Scottish Labour conference is embarrassing.  Whilst the SNP fill stadiums, Scottish Labour have a half empty theatre.  And how do Labour plan on winning over these SNP voters?  By calling them all racists.

Scotland's been operating without a functional opposition for almost a decade. That isn't good news for any democracy.

[IndigoPrime]

I don't think farming in the UK can be "done for" - not as long as people need to eat, anyway.

They don't have to eat food farmed here. Increasingly, they won't be able to. British farming is heavily subsidised and currently relies on EU funding the Tories have said will only be guaranteed through 2020. By then, we'll know for sure what path Brexit is taking, but if it's "let's cosy up to the USA", that requires a major shift in agriculture. Mostly, we'll end up importing an awful lot from the USA (with a corresponding reducing in food standards – we already see American producers lobbying for the dreadful meat products from that country, such as chlorinated chicken and beef with hormones), and British farmers won't be able to compete. That won't mean the end of EVERY British farm, obviously, but an industry already on its knees will become a relative niche.

Elsewhere on this, I certainly don't want people laying into Tankie. It's clear he's very much on the 'other side' of a debate most others here are unified on. My responses here are rather more general: I just don't understand why so many people appear resolute in their convictions regarding a Leave vote. It seems broadly based around vague feelings and optimism with literally nothing to back it up. Purely in trade, the UK is poised to do something that has never been done before, in terms of FTAs, to then spend anything up to a decade fighting hard to secure a worse deal with the EU (while losing scientists, doctors, and academics by the hundreds of thousands), and also to try and secure deals with a great number of countries we already have deals with through the EU. Leave people bang on about South Korea. We already have a deal with them. And any deal we get alone is likely to be worse, given there relative size of our economy and the EU's.

Even if not, Leave people are I think going to be surprised by the required compromises. We're already seeing India push back unless immigration systems are relaxed to allow far more Indians into the UK. Australia, meanwhile, which is the country most often paraded by Leave people, has now started talking a lot about shifting business to Ireland, and that Ireland will soon become the most important nation in Europe (not the EU – Europe) that's English-speaking. The point being the UK was a bridge into the EU, but is about the set fire to the bridge. Others are hoping Ireland will rebuild it and just point it west a bit instead.

I suppose the ultimate issue I have with all this is that I'm a rational person, and so find it mind-boggling and depressing that the country as a whole made a decision based on irrationality. Brexit is mostly about vague feelings about a relationship that was always a fiction and nostalgia for a period that never existed. But we're all going to suffer for it – already, bills and costs are way up but wages aren't heading the same way. What magic will save us in two years? Five? Ten? What's out there beyond pat phrases like "stop talking down Britain?", "I'm optimistic about the future, and I don't know why you aren't?", and "Don't you think it'd be better if we could secure our own trade deals?"?

It's mad.