Damp Squib Day

Today the letter triggering Article 50 was sent to the EU. We are celebrating with fish and chips and cheap but good French champagne bought at Aldi -- no little Englanders we!

Reaction from Remainers seems to have lapsed into quiet despair, with bits of barely-controlled revenge fantasies, apart from a tantrum from a Remainer on BBC  Newsnight last night. As a further contribution to the mystery of the cultural significance of the EU for luvvies, A. Soubry MP was very angry and almost tearful with rage, but she seemed to have a series of symbolic targets -- worry at economic prospects, certainly, but more the demand that Leavers admit they were wrong, and the need to make personal attacks on her Leave debater (mostly for..er..organising politically).

The debate was chaired rather timidly (by Naga Munchetty)  but at least it wasn't E. Davis who would have joined in with tantrums of his own. After complaints from 70 MPs about 'BBC bias', (the Guardian led with the denials from the BBC) the Corporation manages now to crowbar the term 'opportunities' into any sentence about Brexit

There was even an almost reasonable article about the intransigence displayed by both sides in the lead up to the referendum. F Herbert MP in the Guardian began with classic luvviedom about his shame when the Union Flag was displayed on the Brandenberg Gate as a sympathetic response to the terrorist attack in London. 

The article then went on to say Brussels had also been too dismissive of British concerns in failing to exempt Britrain from the free movement of labour proviso, both when Cameron was negotiating the new deal and when the referendum vote was announced. We could have been exempted easily enough -- we are already exempt from the Euro, he argued -- and this would have taken much of the sting out of Brexit support. Instead there was hurt and truculence: 

But the failure was Europe’s too. At first reacting in disbelief, Europe then behaved as a partner scorned. Well, then – go, it said. But you can’t expect to keep the house and the car, and there’ll be a price for this selfish separation.

Sooner or later, free movement in Europe will have to be fixed. Already the Schengen agreement is fragile, suspended in some member states. The EU could not contemplate Turkey joining at some point in the future with free movement in its current form. Yet still the policy is regarded as inviolate, a fundamental but in fact latterly invented freedom of Europe...The catechism of ever closer union is just one sign of the near-religious zealotry that has bedevilled both sides of the debate. The ideology of deeper European integration has created its nemesis in Britain: the doctrine of hard Brexit

After that, normal service was resumed:

The government is now relying on a one-way bet that the electorate won’t change its mind, and that the economic warnings about a hard Brexit are wrong. Few dare question the new orthodoxy, and the retired leaders who speak out are the least persuasive. Yet it wasn’t a mere minority who declined to support the event we are all expected to celebrate on Wednesday: it was nearly half of the country.

I know it might be tiresome to keep saying this, but economic policy always involves risk: we risk another financial crash, for example. There is always a risk the electorate will change its mind but if politicians worried too much about that they would do nothing long term at all (it's bad enough now). The  hostile atmosphere towards dissent was nothing compared to the contemptuous and arrogant dismissal of the Brexit case during the referendum campaign -- and if a large minority has rights, even more so must be the case for a larger majority.

Wind and piss observed

Hysteria mounts as the day of enacting Article 50 dawns --next Wednesday the sky will fall in. 

So I scanned the last pre Article 50 editorial of the Observer with some interest. What would be the last desperate arguments to convince us it was all a mistake?

Here it is. Rather disappointing I thought:

the UK will throw into jeopardy the achievements of 60 years of unparalleled European peace, security and prosperity from which it has greatly benefited

Perhaps the chaos in the Middle East or Libya doesn't count as war? The EU wasn't really provoking Russia in the Ukraine ? Proserpity for the elite means prosperity for the UK?

Most of the rest is classic worse-case scenario or what used to be called Project Fear. Scotland just will declare independence, car businesses will fail, banks will move out, EU citizens will quit the NHS etc. Families will all be worse off. Democracy (sic) has been harmed.

EU negotiating positions are stated as inevitable outcomes -- we will have to pay £50bn:

The figure is disputed. But the principle is not. Britain faces a hugely costly settling of accounts, whatever parti pris barristers may advise [the Observer uses only neutral barristers?] . For good measure, [EU negotiator] Barnier insisted the Irish border conundrum and citizens’ rights must be resolved before other Brexit matters can be discussed.

Above all there is liberal rage and vituperation, mixed with windy metaphors:

the British people, regardless of whether they support Brexit, are being herded off a cliff, duped and misled by the most irresponsible, least trustworthy government in living memory...the peacetime equivalent of the ignominious retreat from Dunkirk. It is a national catastrophe by any measure. It is a historic error. And Theresa May, figuratively waving the cross of St George atop the white cliffs of Dover like a tone-deaf parody of Vera Lynn, will be remembered as the principal author of the debacle. This is not liberation, as Ukip argues, nor even a fresh start. It is a reckless, foolhardy leap into the unknown and the prelude, perhaps, to what the existentialist writer Albert Camus described in La chute – a fall from grace, in every conceivable sense.

To which one can only reply: 'There, there, have a nice cup of tea and switch the telly on. Do your breathing exercises. It'll be alright, you'll see.'

Polly -- morphous perversity

Osborne could be a potent weapon in this Brexit war 

The beloved Polly Toynbee has joined the chorus rehabilitating G Osborne. She charts his dreadful record as a nasty finance capitalist grinding the faces of the poor -- but that sorry account is topped and tailed with a rehabilitation. Because George (Gideon to use his proper name) is likely to speak up for the Remainers AND, as Williams put it yesterday, his class groupuscle, the metropolitan elite.


Why would you want to welcome such a toad? Because it is war, Polly claims, and implies it is as serious as World War II

A war – and Brexit is a civil war – creates the strangest bedfellows. Think Churchill embracing Stalin, Movietone News hymning praises to Uncle Joe, our mass-murdering ally – just for the duration.

 
It never seems to dawn on Guardian liberals, that the  pursuit of finance capital and membership of the EU might be perfectly compatible. Instead, Osborne has to have some split personality, or a (Christian?) redeeming aspect to his personal nastiness.

Equal inexplicability features in this article too. Admittedly it is an odd stance by this bloke, and it does conform to the Guardian view that only dangerous right-wing nutters are in favour of nationalism,  but I bet we will not see any Guardiuna stories abour sinister online manipulation of Scot Nat voters.

Far-right millionaire: I'll use social media network to back Scottish independence

“I have been a fanatical defender of the union, but I am a pragmatist, and England is finished. It is not just finished because of the Muslim problem and immigration, but also because as of now we are looking at permanent Tory rule. There is no effective opposition to the Tories, so what do you want then – permanent Conservative rule for the next 30 years?”

He defended himself against potential charges from fellow loyalists both in Northern Ireland and Scotland of becoming an ally of the SNP. “The thing is, if you want to kill off the SNP, then have independence. It would be just like Ukip after Brexit, as there would be no need any more for an SNP once there was independence.”

OK Hitler made some mistakes, but he was pro-Europe

Remainers have a bit of ideological adjustment to do after several of the usual targets of liberal ire and disgust have come out in favour of the EU. These include T Blair, J Major and G Osborne. 

The first two are familiar figures of hate and derision respectively, but Osborne has attracted much flak of late for taking on lots of jobs after being deposed as Chancellor of the Exchequer when May took over. Being an after-dinner speaker (enormous fees) was bad,  but being a director of a bank (330k for one day a week) was worse. 

Positively evil was becoming editor of the London Evening Standard last week. A petition to demand he prioritise was signed by over 100k people.The Guardian expressed fears about Tory dominance of the media

But, but...the chap is likely to use his editorship to bang on about the dangers of Brexit, so he isn't all bad.

As a result, this was the headline of a Guardian article this morning:

George Osborne’s new role means we may find ourselves agreeing with him 

In our post-Brexit landscape, the former chancellor at the Evening Standard will be a rare voice speaking up for the much-scorned ‘metropolitan elite’ 

I think we should be told!!

Panic and paranoia persists in paper. The Guardian had the egregious feature writer C Cadwallader explaining that Brexit had all been staged by sinister and dark forces. There were all the ingredients of a classic conspiracy story and liberal moral panic:

Some suspicions:

did foreign individuals or powers, acting covertly, subvert our democracy?

There are mounting and deeply disquieting questions about the role “dark money” may have played during last year’s EU referendum; and about whether the use of offshore jurisdictions, loopholes in European and North American data laws, undeclared foreign donors, a closed, all-powerful technological system (Facebook) and an antiquated and hopelessly out-of-touch oversight body has undermined the very foundations of our electoral system.

Some 'knowns' [rather variable in terms of how well they are known and to whom]: 

This is what we know: the Electoral Commission is still assessing claims that potentially illegal donations were made; the information commissioner is investigating “possible illegal” use of data; the heads of MI6 and GCHQ have both voiced unprecedented warnings about foreign interference in our democratic systems; the government has refused to elaborate on what these are; one of the leave campaigns has admitted the undeclared support and help of the American hedge fund billionaire who backed Trump; the Crown Prosecution Service is being asked to mount a criminal investigation; and questions have been raised about possible unlawful collaboration between different elements of the leave campaign.

Some [rather general] warnings from authorities:

the man who invented the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, who said he was “extremely worried” about the future of democracy; that data harvesting was being used to “chilling” effect; that political targeting on the basis of it was “unethical”; and that the internet had been weaponised and was being used against us....The second came from GCHQ, whose National Cyber Security Centre head has written to the main political parties warning of hostile interference.

A couple of smears'n'fears [of 'new' technology] :

the law demands that coordinated campaigns declare their expenditure and are subject to a strict combined limit. Yet here we see four different campaigns using the same tiny Canadian company based thousands of miles and seven time zones away. Coincidence?  ...we do know that data is power: Facebook admitted [or should that be boasted?] last week that it can use data to swing elections – for the right price. [the source for this was an interview with M. Zuckerberg in something called Quartz, who made that claim and said FB used sophisticated targeting and analysis for its ads. Despite apparent evidence for a shift in intent to support candidates, FB also said it had backed some unsuccessful campaigns too].

And a demand that the authorities tell us what really happened -- and their silence is proof of conspiracy: 

May’s government has refused to tell us what those risks are. What does Younger know? Why has parliament not been told? Who is investigating, and when will we know the results? Where is Dominic Grieve, the head of the intelligence select committee, in all this? And how can any of us have any trust in the democratic process when vital information is being kept from us?

As the headline triumphantly concluded:

Theresa May must not trigger article 50 before these vital questions are answered

Guardian looks North

The big news today is that the Government has overcome the Lords' amendments to the Bill to empower May to trigger Brexit. She can now invoke Article 50 to leave the EU whenever she wants.

However, the Graudian thought it was more important to register a demand from the Scot Nats to have another referndum on on Scottish independence as a result of not getting a special deal from the UK Government for Scotland alone to stay in the Single Market. It was headline news in my early edition, saying Sturgeon had trumped May.

Since then, Sturgeon and May have been waving their pudenda around in a contest to see who will pull hair the harder.

Sturgeon's speech announcing her decision to call for a new referendum (she needs the UK Government to accede to one), as reported on the BBC at least (!) seemed to set aside the economic difficulties, and skate over the issue of the Scottish currency, in the name of some fantasy about Scottish identity and pride, somehow identified with EU membership. Old fashioned nationalism it seems. She also seems to think that the majority who voted for Remain in Scotland, and some of those in the majority who had voted to stay in the UK in the earlier referendum, would also vote for this old fashioned nationalism. 

Such people would now have to place membership of the EU above their preferences for membership in the UK OR people who had voted to be cosmopolitan Europeans would now vote to be narrow Scots. 

I remain puzzled by this. What exactly does the EU mean, culturally speaking, to the Remainers? Why is it so important to what they see as their core values and identity? I asked a Remainer in my family -- is it just a good place to go on holiday? She nodded. Is it interesting enough culturally to learn a European language? Silence. How about wanting to live there? Silence.

As I said in my first post -- I am more European culturally speaking than many Remainers, but that doesn't camouflage the failed and sinister economic project of the EU.

Pot identifies mote in kettle's eye

Re the use of headlines that mislead compared to the actual story, the Grauniad notes a occurence in a rival newspaper. It's not a Brexit story, but the structure is similar:

Beloved BBC radio broadcaster and host of Woman's Hour is in the doodoo with some remarks about the issue of transgender women:

Jenni Murray: trans women shouldn't call themselves 'real women' 

 The report goes on to say:

Murray, writing in the Sunday Times magazine, said that she was “not transphobic or anti-trans” and called for respect and protection from bullying and violence equally for “transsexuals, transvestites, gays, lesbians and those of us who hold to the sex and sexual preference assumed at birth”.
However, the piece appeared under the less nuanced heading: “Jenni Murray: Be trans, be proud – but don’t call yourself a ‘real woman’.

The rest of the Graun story repeats Murray's actual argument.  As an example:

In the piece Murray wrote of her anger over some trans women who had spoken on the issue, including the late Rev Carol Stone: “Her primary concerns, she told me, were finding the most suitable dress in which to meet her parishioners in her new persona and deciding if she should wear makeup or not.”
“I wondered when Carol would experience what so many newly ordained women had heard from fellow priests as they passed through the vestry. ‘Pulpit pussy’, they told me, was the favoured insult, and they found it demeaning, disgusting and it hurt.
“It was news to Carol that life as a woman, especially a middle-aged woman, stepping into male territory in which she was unwelcome would be extremely tough. I prayed Carol would not find it so hard. Experience told me otherwise. It wasn’t going to be all about frocks and makeup. It was about sexual politics and feminism – ideas of which she seemed woefully unaware.”

So is the Graun eating its fellow dog with this story, blaming the Sunday Times for misleading journalism? If so, how ironic is that? The irony is compounded by the Garuniad repeating the  approach with its own story and shouty headline, of course.

 

They are manipulating us!

The echoes of liberal campaigns against Brexit are still heard via the fake headlines tactic. Today's Absurder, for example had this:

Watchdog to launch inquiry into misuse of data in politics 

The UK’s privacy watchdog is launching an inquiry into how voters’ personal data is being captured and exploited in political campaigns, cited as a key factor in both the Brexit and Trump victories last year.

The story was then built up in classic ways: 'Mercer [CEO of the company concerned, Cambridge Analytics]  is a friend of former Ukip leader Nigel Farage'...'A spokesman for Cambridge Analytica denied it had played any role – either paid or unpaid – during the referendum campaign, something that would have to be declared to the Electoral Commission. But Green MP Caroline Lucas, who campaigned for Remain, said: “Clearly, there are questions to be answered about [whether Farage has stopped beating his wife] the Leave campaign’s use of big data and a potentially huge [all donations are potentially huge I suppose]  ‘in kind’ donation by Cambridge Analytica'.

'A 2015 presentation by one of Cambridge Analytica’s analysts, until recently available [no doubt withdrawn now as a cover up] on YouTube, explained how it had used “Facebook likes … as an input to machine-learning models.”', but, a para or two below: 'The Cambridge Analytica spokesman said: “We do not use data from Facebook. We do not have access to Facebook likes … What you have sent us relates to a research project done in 2015 with an intern data scientist using an anonymous data set. The goal was to reproduce findings in the peer-reviewed literature … Its application for us is limited by the fact that we don’t have Facebook likes covering the population (only Facebook has those data).”

It looked at first like a real scandal was brewing, if you just caught the headline, maybe one big enough to declare the whole referendum null and void. A few paras down it was more like 'Not much to see here, move along' EXCEPT there is no smoke without fire, of course. The same tone was maintained in the longer feature article in the newspaper

To turn it into a story confirned by other sources and add to the conspiracy:

BuzzFeed News [!] recently revealed how Vote Leave gave £625,000 to a student, Darren Grimes, which he then used to hire AggregateIQ to produce a targeted [targeted how -- we are not told but the implication is by using Facebook data again] pro-leave Facebook ad campaign - apparently with spectacular results [says who -- a campaign director!]. Dominic Cummings, the campaign director of Vote Leave, declared: “Without a doubt, the Vote Leave campaign owes a great deal of its success to the work of AggregateIQ. We couldn’t have done it without them.”

 Incidentally, the BuzzFeed site goes on to say, right at the end of its story, that:

A spokesperson for the Electoral Commission said it had investigated Grimes following the original BuzzFeed News story and had not found any evidence of the law being broken, which would attract a potential maximum fine of £20,000.

So the liberal take is complete. Sinister figures have used really underhand and sneakily techy devices to 'target' voters. The combination of new technologies like algorithms and Facebook  [!] takes this far away from the usual techniques of 'targetted' leafletting, advertising or emails, of course. And these sneaky techniques have a devilish capacity to work, maybe even subconsciously, to influence people to take decisions that are clearly not in their interests and that are obviously irrational and mad. The law is powerless to stop this! Something else must be done!

Curiously, the techniques must have been particularly effective among the elderly, the 'left-behinds' and the non-metropolitan voters who embraced Leave especially

Of course, we don't know who actually 'cited' the results as being 'key',although we have the comments of one 'expert':

Dr Simon Moores, visiting lecturer in the applied sciences and computing department at Canterbury Christ Church University and a technology ambassador under the Blair government' [that's his credibility fucked then] who said:

“A rapid convergence in the data mining, algorithmic and granular analytics capabilities of companies like Cambridge Analytica and Facebook is creating powerful, unregulated and opaque ‘intelligence platforms’. In turn, these can [!] have enormous influence to affect what we learn, how we feel [really sinister], and how we vote. The algorithms they may produce are frequently hidden from scrutiny and we see only the results of any insights they might choose to publish.”