Few subjects ignite as much passion in the House or indeed in the country as our membership of the European Union. The debate in the run-up to the referendum will be hard fought on both sides of the argument. But whether we favour Britain being in or out, we surely should all be able to agree on the simple principle that the decision about our membership should be taken by the British people, not by Whitehall bureaucrats, certainly not by Brussels Eurocrats; not even by Government Ministers or parliamentarians in this Chamber. The decision must be for the common sense of the British people. That is what we pledged, and that is what we have a mandate to deliver. For too long, the people of Britain have been denied their say. For too long, powers have been handed to Brussels over their heads. For too long, their voice on Europe has not been heard. This Bill puts that right. It delivers the simple in/out referendum that we promised, and I commend it to the House.
Quite clear…he thinks the decision to leave the EU is for the British public….not ministers, bureaucrats and not even Parliament.
Hilary Benn must agree judging by his words…
This Bill will set before the British people a clear and simple question: should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union? It is 11 words, but the answer will have profound consequences for the future of our country, as the people of the United Kingdom make the most important decision on our place in the world for 40 years…..uncertainty about Britain’s place in Europe is not good for the British economy, so we should get on and make this decision so that the British people can have their say, and I hope they will reach a decision to remain in the European Union.
We want a debate and for everybody to participate, and we want the British people to make that judgment.
Benn though points out Labour’s true position…
We support the Bill and its passage through Parliament, but we also support Britain remaining a member of the EU.
So when they now say they respect the outcome of the referendum they don’t really mean it.
Benn makes a point in 2015 that undermines the BBC et al’s current narrative about the voters not knowing what they were voting for…
My view is that the question is perfectly clear and very simple. I do not think that anyone who goes into the polling station on the day, whenever it is, will not understand the consequence of voting either way.
You may have heard the BBC’s expressions of horror about the Mail having the temerity to outline the Supreme Court Judges’ history on the EU…something you might think relevant and of interest to anyone who is following the case. The BBC thinks this undermines the Judges’ independence and threatens democracy and the rule of law.
Never mind that just about every other paper and publication has done similar examinations of the Judges’ history and possible political leanings…but the BBC only criticises the Mail.
Imagine then my surprise this morning when the BBC itself moved to attack the Judges…for being too white, too male, too old. Naturally they are incapable of reaching a fair judgement because of their sex, colour and age….their vast legal experience and technical expertise amounts to nothing. Clearly they only got the job because of the Old Boy network…the one women aside.
Bizarre what the BBC thinks important as to what qualifies you to do a job…not experience or technical expertise and professional qualification…but the colour of your skin or your gender. The Mail is a rabble-rousing danger to society for examining the Judges’ political leanings but someone who defines them purely by their colour or gender is OK.
David Lidington, May’s stand-in at PMQs, put on quite a performance, less Flashman than Cameron but mastered the job just as well and far more fluent and quietly aggressive than May….he pretty much crushed Labour’s Emily Thornberry though you’d never know that from the BBC’s post-mortem which gave the win to Thornberry.
Thornberry certainly was technically proficient, she’d done her homework digging up quotes about Brexit that Lidington himself had made but she couldn’t make anything stick because she had no substance to her claims…the quotes were from before the referendum and clearly Lidington’s own views are not the government’s. She based her whole attack on a demand to know the government’s position on the Custom’s Union and whether we would leave it on Brexit…suggesting the nation would grind to a halt if we did. The BBC told us this was a very important point and we needed to know about it.
What the BBC failed to make clear was that this line of attack shows Labour is clearly not going to support Brexit…as Keir Starmer in the later debate also made clear as he claimed the referendum gave no mandate for a ‘hard Brexit’…when of course that was precisely and absolutely what it did give…a vote for OUT….meaning no single market, no open borders and no political control from Brussels. Starmer indicates that Labour will try to finesse Brexit out of existence by demanding the single market, the customs union and so on….whilst of course ‘respecting the outcome of the referendum’….lol…lying bastards.
There is no such thing as ‘soft Brexit’….it is a lie…soft Brexit means continuing to allow Brussels to dictate our immigration policy and that is what we voted to stop.
The BBC should stop promoting the idea that there is such a thing as a ‘soft Brexit’ and start challenging those who raise the subject far harder than they do…if they do at all. Yesterday we had Campbell keeping the ‘soft Brexit’ narrative going, that we can have ‘Brexit’ even though free movement continues….the BBC wants to keep that conversation going, to normalise the idea of a soft Brexit and to present it as the most sensible and only viable option thus hoping to delay a decision, confuse the issues and pressure the government into a compromise.
‘Soft Brexit’ is fake news….much as ‘Populism’ is a creation of the Left used by the BBC to dismiss voters and results it hates.
Speaking of which…Tory Steven Baker during PMQs accused the BBC of manufacturing fake news, inventing stories of backbench unrest, divison and rebellion about the EU. Wouldn’t be at all surprised. The BBC of course didn’t report that bit about the BBC generating fake news…they instead made up more fake news and suggested that he was merely aggrieved at the BBC attacking the government. Emma Barnett laughed and said that was the BBC journalists’ job…to make life difficult for the government. Yes, of course it is, there was me thinking it had to report news accurately, fairly and impartially…how foolish.
The BBC of course is horrified…their first thought was to compare Trump getting this acknowledgement with Nixon and Stalin getting it. Not JFK or Obama then?
The one the BBC really hates though is this…..
The BBC hates the fact that it no longer controls the ‘facts’ anymore.
A quick one as time limited….this morning we heard on Nicky Campbell that Leave voters, and Trump voters, and no doubt Italian voters as well, were ‘clinging on to political solutions that have nothing to do with their problems…and it could all lead to the 1930’s again’.
Yep…they’re all stupid, ignorant racists harping back to some golden age that is not only unachievable but leading us back to the savage dark ages of a fascist future. Trump’s solutions are all wrong…he’s wrong in Iran [er..no he’s not], he’s wrong about the economy…we can’t have protectionism or tariffs…er….isn’t that what the EU single market is all about…you can only join the club if you follow the rules and pay the hefty membership fees? Every country employs protectionist policies in some form or another….such as subsidising firms like Nissan to build factories here….that’s still protectionism and not a free market.
The Left’s solution seems to be the old one…don’t try and protect jobs just pay people to stay on welfare when they get the push…but of course that ultimately can only work if you have the taxes coming in to pay welfare…taxes that come from the industry that you don’t want to defend….as Thatcher said…
‘The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.’
Anyway back to today and conveniently Milo Yiannopoulus has just released a video of a presentation at Miami University in which he covers the real problem today…the censorship of thought and ideas by the Left…amongst many other things….the way the Left tries to close down debate by shouting ‘racist’ or ‘Nazi’..or ‘we’re heading back to the 1930’s’…which ties us into Campbell and his fellow travellers as they try to link Jo Cox to the Leave campaign. Get over the style and deliberately provocative delivery and listen to what he has to say…the substance of the talk is very relevant and poignant, and all too true.
“This is a burning building you are never meant to leave. What is more, you are barricaded in.” William Hague December 2016
Trust…always been a bit of a problem with politicians…and journalists…nothing new about the ‘post-fact’ age except the fancy new name….’post-fact’ being a lie in itself ironically.
Wiliam Hague…a man who made a career out of Euroscepticism, who then jumped ship and announced he was voting to Remain has now just discovered, once again, that the EU is a failed experiment. on the verge of collapse..
It provided a test of the willingness of voters to back major political reforms, and of their patience with an economic performance that has been truly dismal ever since the euro was invented. The answer is clear: they are not willing and their patience is just about exhausted.
But the really bad news is that, even had he won, it is extremely unlikely that Renzi could have done enough to revive the Italian economy and avert the eventual break-up of the euro.
Leaving the European Union risks the “fragmentation of the western world”, the former foreign secretary William Hague has said.
Before a speech on Wednesday entitled: “Why a Eurosceptic should vote to remain,” Lord Hague admitted he saw the European Union as “the lesser of evils” compared with the damage to the economy and to international instability a leave vote would deliver.
Challenged by the Today presenter Nick Robinson over the numerous criticisms he had made of the EU over his political career, Hague said he had been persuaded that both the national and international landscape had changed so significantly in the past two decades that staying in was the safer choice.
Hague will say in the speech later on Wednesday that those who want to leave the EU are indulging in fantasy economics, according to the Times.
Just how many countries does Hague think should leave? Italy? Portugal? Spain? Greece? Ireland? etc etc. Maybe even the downbeaten France?
Sheer hypocrisy from Hague. One moment the EU is the saviour of us all, then next he admits that’s a bit ‘post-factual’ and the EU is dragging us to disaster.
Nick Robinson ‘challenged’ Hague over his Euroscepticism, will he now be ‘challenging’ Hague over his short-lived romance with Europhilia now he has converted back to scepticism? Somehow doubt Robinson will be challenging Hague as to why he wanted to vote Remain but will now hit him hard for doing another about-face.
Hague and all those Remainers have been lying through their teeth about the state of the EU and the ‘security’ it provides us economically. Even the BBC’s old favourite, Joseph Stiglitz, thinks the EU is on the verge due to the Euro….the BBC of course having quickly reported his thoughts don’t like to remind us of them anymore…..
Europe is heading towards a “cataclysmic event” that could lead to the collapse of the euro and the end of the European project as we know it, according to Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.
“I think the most likely thing is something along the lines of a political cataclysmic event like Brexit. In other words, the eurozone’s member countries are democracies and one sees increasing hostility to the euro, which is unfortunately spilling over to a broader hostility to the broader European project and liberal values,” Stiglitz told BI from his office in New York.
Stiglitz continued: “That’s going to be the end. What’s going to happen is that there will be a definite consensus that Europe is not working. The diagnosis will be to shed the currency and keep the rest, or that Europe is not working and a broader rejection — like in the UK.
The Euro was never going to work without political and economic union, but it will never work with such a union as it will entail Germany, and the UK should we be in the EU still, paying out billions to prop up these countries that don’t have the ability to sort out their own economy due to the Euro severely restricting what they can do…..and no German or Brit is ever going to want to pay possibly hundreds of billions to these countries on a never ending welfare scheme…and so the Euro will again implode. Whichever way you look the Euro will fail. But the Remain camp and the BBC continue in lala land with their heads buried in the sand telling us we must remain shackled to this failed experiment, this ‘burning building’.
“I don’t want them moving out of the country without consequences,” Mr. Trump said, even if that means angering the free-market-oriented Republicans he beat in the primaries but will have to work with on Capitol Hill.
“The free market has been sorting it out and America’s been losing,” Mr. Pence added, as Mr. Trump interjected, “Every time, every time.”
It seems that after nearly a century of Republicans framing the difference between the GOP and the Democrats as one of “free enterprise” versus “socialism,” the nation’s top Republican has effectively shifted the debate to how the government will regulate the economy and for whose benefit. Whether more traditional Congressional Republicans like it or not.
Which is fine. Bring it on.
Odd isn’t it that the BBC and the EU fanatics suddenly all support the great capitalist adventure that is Globalism except when it suits…..such as when they make examples of Amazon or Starbucks for failing to pay taxes in this country…but they look the other way when the Corporations dump jobs here and export them to China or India and then flog us the goods made there at low cost and pile up the profits for themselves. Why is that any less harmful than not paying taxes here? The taxes we are told are needed for the welfare benefits…presumably of those sacked and put on the scrapheap by the same corporations. If they didn’t dump all the workers there would be no need for welfare.
A review into Muslim integration, lack of, was under discussion….you might praise the BBC for broaching the subject. Or not. Who did they get on to tell us why the review was so wrong? MPACUK. MPACUK that many in the know say is an anti-semitic, pro-Jihad Islamist group that has very little support, if any, amongst Muslims. The BBC seems to have a love of the wrong uns….the MCB for example…which a recent Policy Exchange report labels as very, very unrepresentative of Muslims in Britain. Or MEND. Or Cage. Or any other foam-flecked Islamist who claims to speak for Muslims.
Did enjoy Nicky Campbell correcting a caller who told us that his Muslim friends didn’t want to mix with white people…Campbell quickly interrupted to say that this is not about race…this is about religion. [hmmm…isn’t Islam a ‘race’ now?] Campbell then one minute later interrupted the same guy as he spoke about Islam and how it effected how Muslims saw non-Muslims, Campbell told him not to be racist……so one minute the guy is racist for telling us what his friends said, Campbell saying it is about religion, then, paradoxically, he is also racist for relating it to what the religion says. Campbell has many Muslim friends…so he knows a lot…taught everything he knows by the great Islamic scholar Mo Ansar.
The new, and laughable, narrative from the Establishment anti-Brexit cabal is that they are now the insurgents…that’s right…all those senior politicians, the most powerful media organisations, billionaires, lawyers and academics….the new insurgents. All routed it might be said by one bloke with a pint pot, a fag and a great disrespect for that unruly mob of the High and Mighty.
I might also suggest that rather than being the insurgents they are the same old Deadly Donkeys, with their deeply entrenched ideas and vested interests, misleading the Lions. This is the power elite desperately trying to cling on to that power.
The utter contempt that these Donkeys hold Leave voters in is the same attitude reflected in Clinton’s dismissal of Trump voters as ‘Deplorables’. Farron just has to open his mouth and the bile comes pouring out, the sneers and arrogant contempt that he has for Leave voters and democracy [apparently they’re not ‘decent nor moderate’ unlike the Richmond voters] whilst ironically claiming his push for a second referendum is ‘democracy’ rather than the Establishment seeking to crush one of the most democratic and representative votes this country has ever had. Having said that he has had a sudden damascene conversion it seems…a vote in Richmond [Isn’t Goldsmith a complete knob? When an MP he couldn’t block Heathrow…so stands down in order to get re-elected, he hoped, in order to er stop Heathrow as an MP], a turnout of 54%, or just over 41,000 voters resulting in a Libdem victory, apparently suggests to Farron that Brexit has been over-turned by popular consensus….ignoring the 74% turnout for the referendum and the actual vote of 52%, 17 million, in favour. Funny old world democracy. Never mind that the stats say the Remain vote fell.
Nick Clegg follows in the footsteps of his old spinner James McGrory and takes a pasting from Andrew Neil on the single market. Brillo’s killer line: “Isn’t it time the LibDems had a rebrand and dropped the Democrat?” Cue Clegg silent death stare…
The BBC is of course, Andrew Neil aside, pretty well on-board the Remain bandwagon, with programmes practically turned over to subtle and not-so subtle Remain propaganda and narratives, and more often than not packed with Remain voices. We of course know, because the BBC keeps telling us, that the country is now ‘divided’…hmmm….isn’t that always the case? What about all those voters who didn’t vote Tory in the election? Where was the scream about a ‘divided country’ then? It’s just a convenient narrative dreamt up to force the Remain agenda on Brexit….we must not ignore the 48%. Why not? It was a clear vote on one question…in or out of the EU? How can you compromise on that without completely overturning the vote and thwarting Brexit completely? Wouldn’t want that to happen would we BBC?
Emma Barnett thought that the problem was the Brexit mob…they are so angry because Remain won’t accept the democratic vote that their anger is dividing the country…yes it’s the Leave voters whose irrational and groundless rage is driving a wedge across communities…not the Remain camp that steadfastly refuses to accept the democratic vote and is doing everything in its power to thwart the democratic process in order to crush Brexit then? The Remain camp that rather than ‘heal’ things by maintaining economic and political stability and working to enact and enable Brexit seeks to cause chaos, uncertainty and instability.
You just have to see the language the Remain camp uses to describe Leave voters to see the contempt they hold them in and just who is really creating any division, anger and dissent. We’ve already mentioned Farron dismissing Leave voters as not being decent and moderate, the wretched and untrustworthy Tory, Anna Soubry, calls them racist, prejudiced, ignorant and intolerant fools…though of course she tries hard to dress it up…saying they are ‘nativist’ rather than the Far Right Fascists she wants to call them. She claims that the British Public are being misled and misinformed….she tells us that we have ‘ceded the field to the ill-informed, intolerant and often prejudiced.’ That’s half the voters then.
That is of course the narrative that the BBC presses as well….only this morning we heard that Trump was elected by people who voted based purely on emotion, how they felt, rather than on any reasoned basis…Trump had no policies, he just ran his campaign on the soundbite…‘It doesn’t feel great does it?…so vote for me’...whereas as Hilary was ‘facts, facts, facts’. Naturally that is utter nonsense….Trump repeatedly stated his poplicies in reasoned and measured tones in interview after interview….none of which the BBC bothered to publicise or discuss preferring to shout racist and Islamophobe and sexist at him.
Historian Niall Ferguson quotes Salena Zito on Trump…..
‘The Press takes Trump literally but not seriously. The voters take him seriously but not literally’
Ferguson thinks this is ‘the smartest thing said about the 2016 election and deserves a place in every dictionary of quotations’. Which is quite funny as Ferguson spent the election run-up denouncing Trump as the spawn of the Devil…I guess as a historian it doesn’t do to be on the wrong side of history. The BBC should have that quote tattooed on every employee’s forehead as a reminder to dump the hubris, the prejudice and the bias and to do their job….report the facts, report reality, report uncomfortable truths. Don’t report only what you think the Public needs to hear, what you want them to hear….such as the BBC’s very own definition of the new evil that stalks the world…’Populism’.
Ah yes…’Populism’…the new obsession of the BBC…it’s a negative thing of course…can’t have people actually being allowed to vote the way they want to…and that is the essence of the debate. The BBC’s idea of Populism is a rampant, Far-Right mob out of control bringing to power someone who doesn’t hold the Liberal values they do.
The reality is that the BBC doesn’t like Populism because it is in fact people voting in their own interest and not how the elite, including the BBC, tells them they should vote….and, if they fail to vote that way, to vote again until they get it right…ala Clegg and Co. This is the Populism that Kirsty Wark so unashamedly sneered at this morning as that ‘corralled by‘…and she paused…‘groups like UKIP’. I think her language says it all as to how she views the Brexit vote….she compared the Levellers to Leave voters…..we heard they were ‘useful idiots’. Note all her guests were the usual media types and politically left cabal that we come to expect from the BBC as they talk of populism and patriotism. The whole programme was just one long, sneaky sneer at Brexit voters meant to dismiss them as fools telling us that the ‘elite’ would take over anyway once the ‘revolution’ was over….so the message was…why have the revolution? Stay in the EU.
In the chancelleries of Europe, in the gilded suburbs and Michelin-starred restaurants, the cry goes up: the populists are coming! The populists are coming! Not since Attila the Hun swept towards Rome has there been such fear and trembling.
Europe has long been a drag anchor on the world economy, and is likely to remain so. But the best way to improve its situation is for mainstream leaders to provide good economics with good politics – that is to say, reform with reassurance.
Doing so won’t keep the barbarians from the gates. But it might just prevent them from breaking through.
However CapX at least recognises there is a massive problem with the EU….it needs reform or shutting down…and this is a subject that you don’t hear on the BBC….the problem with the EU and its unelected technocratic government….the one the People voted against, a vote the BBC doesn’t recognise as about sovereignty and immigration preferring instead to say it is all about the economy…..which is why the BBC whole narrative is about insisting that leaving the EU is economically bad….which proves they just don’t understand what the vote was about….and why they lost….
While we hear an awful lot about populism, we hear an awful lot less about the equal and opposite problem – technocracy.
The European Union is, at heart, a technocratic project – one reason why it has always been so reluctant to submit itself for popular endorsement. But it also tends to produce technocratic governance in individual nation-states.
After the euro, the ultimate expression of the Brussels ideal, succeeded in impoverishing half the continent, the governments that resulted were often as beholden to the international money-men as to their citizens, if not more so.
The result has been an ungainly gavotte, in country after country, between populism and technocracy. Grey men in suits take power. Disillusioned voters turn to colourful extremists. Colourful extremists screw everything up. Re-enter the men in grey.
There is obviously an argument that none of this can be fixed in a fundamental sense until the euro is either mended (via proper fiscal integration of the continent) or ended.
But in the immediate term, both technocracy and populism are dead ends: the one infuriates the voters, the other ultimately disappoints them.
Shame the BBC doesn’t see fit to enter that debate about the utter and complete failure of the Euro and the damage it has wrought across Europe in respect of the Leave campaign….the BBC always told us that the Leave side were not voting for something [when in fact of course they were voting for something…getting their country back in simple terms], a BBC narrative intended to push a message that there are no policies at the heart of the Brexit adventure…it’s just a nihilistic scream of rage that will ruin us all. The BBC never once raised the alternative, the inconvenient question as to what the future would be like if we voted to stay in the EU as it headed inevitably towards an ever-closer, stifling union [ie the total ending of Britain as a sovereign, united, nation] and dragged us ultimately into the ruinous Euro.
[As the Italian vote result came through this morning and the Euro fell the BBC rushed to tell us that the fall in the value of the Euro is a good thing….the Pound falls and it is armageddon….how different the narrative when you’re a believer]
An example of the BBC’s uniquely informative, thoughtful and educational programming…Wark’s programme ended with the thought that ‘Trump is terrifying for the world’. Not Obama then who stood back and allowed Islamist terrorists to set up a Caliphate, a policy that inflicted millions of Refugees upon Europe, that allowed Assad to destroy his country and kill hundreds of thousands, that allowed Russia to control the geo-political world narrative, that handed Iran the keys to the nuclear weapons box…not to be opened for a few years ….so that’s all right then? I can see why he got the Nobel Peace Prize.
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