Luvvies rally

A strange appearance by the undead Lord Mandelson on Newsnight, which I only half-heard, was explained todfay by a Graud headline (in my edition):

Remain campaigners urge voters to unseat Brexit-backing MPs 

Apparently, the residue of the Open Britain Group (who had campaigned to remain) are calling for an ant-Brexit alliance to defend Remain Labour MPs in Leave constituencies, and unseat Leave MPs in Remain ones. T Bliar has a column urging this course in the Graun as well. Both are careful to say they are mostly supporting Labour candidates and not urging tactical voting -- so they can't be booted out of the Labour Party, although there is a petition. Tellingly, although the messages are identical, one is considered news and the other opinion.

Had it been the other way around, no doubt the BBC and Gaurundia would be declaiming the wickedness of further division and banging on about sinister unelected groups undermining democray to deselect MPs.

In all of these the alleged goal is to achieve 'soft Brexit' but this is never defined. Sometimes, it is a vague matter of keeping open as many links with the EU as possible. Blair defines it as a campaign against “Brexit at any cost” (nice and ambiguous) .Mandelson says the aim is demanding that 'a hard Brexit is rejected and making clear that they [MPs] will reserve judgment on the outcome until they see whether we get exactly the same trade benefits [as promised]' (leaving the door open for another referendum when the EU plays tough?). What is not clear is whether the position of the EU has altered -- no such thing as a soft Brexit they were arguing.

There is encouraging (for Remainers) evidence that opinion is still evenly split, according to a YouGov poll in the Indie, reported as giving 44% to each group on leaving or remaining in the EU,with 12% undecided. Actually the poll is about agrement with May's specified goals on Europe, and the same poll shows strong support for limiting immigration, which will still be the sticking point unless the EU budges.

There is still a worryingly valid claim by the Mandellair clique. May is using Brexit as an excuse to get a mandate for the austerity regime as well -- and diverting attention away from the looming elctoral expenses fraud cases affecting the Tories.

 

Not exactly fake news

Just to bring it up to date, May declared a snap election for June 7th, taking everyone by surprise, including the smug idiot N. Watt on Newsnight whose schtick is to pretend he is intimately informed by Cabinet insiders when he trots out his own views.

Anyway, luvvies have decided it all calls for an alliance  of the Good and Metropolitan to defeat the Govt, largely on the grounds that May announced she was fed up with all the internal threats to delay Brexit. If she wins the predicted majority, it will be a mandate to proceed, she argues. Before we go any further, it is awful that the Tories are indeed likely to win because it will also be a mandate for further cuts and austerity, maybe slightly lighter at best than before.

Normally it would be easy to decide who to vote for -- but Labour is still faffing with luvviedom, soft Brexit and 'free' movement of labour (never read Marx, obviously ) although not enough to gain the support (or even the neutrality) of the BBC. They are in the opposite bind -- Corbyn has also promised social reforms like higher taxes on 'the Establishment' (dear God - no other category?).

Anyway (again) today the Graun led (at least in my early edition) with the headline 

It's not too late to avert Brexit says EU leader. 

This has now been amended, together with the running order on the website, but it dominated even news of the Paris shooting. The story is a classic one based, no doubt, on a press release or leak from the 'European Parliament Chief', one Antonio Tajani (me neither).

Apparently, it could all easily be reversed if there were a new Government. Tajani would be happy, and thinks so would all 27 states. This was backed with a threat to veto the talks if EU citizens did not get their rights (increasingly coupled with a demand that the EU Court of Justice remain as the ultimate authority).

No need for all this labyrinthine discussion with the EU Parliament and all 27 states, it seems, if we wanted to stay. Only labyrinthine discussion etc if we want to leave. The Parliament Chief can wave his wand in the first case but not the second.

Luvvies seem to never learn that all this will backfire badly, except for those voting for 'Hard Remain' (who are never mentioned or discussed as a category, incidentally).

Meanwhile,the Paris shooting has become headline news. There is still a Little Englander agenda though (inevitably via Martin Kettle) -- it might encourage votes for hardline candidates for the imminent French Presidential elections, 2 of whom at least want to bin the euro and end the Schengen Agreement on free movement. Kettle worries about LePen 

by far the most ultra-right leader of a major western European state since the death of the Spanish fascist leader Francisco Franco 

but also

the uber-Corbynista candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon,  

Luckily there is Macron:

youthful, modernising, liberal on social issues, technocratic, financial backgrounds, Anglophone.

If only we had such a candidate to advocate some sort of Third Way, maybe one inspired by God to invade Middle Eastern countries while he was there.

Slipping it in

All is relatively quite, given other things to worry about, like Trump sabre-rattling at North Korea (having missiled Assad bases in Syria), and whether or not Ted Hughes abused Sylvia Plath 50 years ago when they were both alive.

There is still stuff like the Guardian suggesting, in a link characteristic of 'news values' that foreign governments might have hacked a voter registration site in advance of the EU Referendum. Foreign hacking is very fashionable and it was blamed for the US Presidential election too (another terrible shock to Guardianistas, of course).

Foreign governments such as Russia and China may have been involved in the collapse of a voter registration website in the run-up to the EU referendum, a committee of MPs has claimed

At the time, that collapse in registration facilities was widely seen as disenfranchising the young (for some reason) who might have voted to remain, based on hints already that the young were disproportionately unregistered. Why they would have been particularly shy about using websites is unclear.  The site does seem to have collapsed after a surge in demand right at the last minute, which coud have been a denial of service attack: was the surge really massive?

The Government extended the deadline for registration anyway, and overall:

While the incident had no material effect on the outcome of the referendum, the committee said it was crucial that lessons were learned for future votes that must extend beyond purely technical issues.

But you can't keep a good Remoaner down.The Guardian today has an editorial about changes in Government statistics which mean we have only inadequare data about inflation (so seasoned Guardian readers are already smelling rat since inflation rates are an issue in whether or not Brexit has been catastrophic already), and sure enough, as a parting shot:

The ONS boasts that confidence in its statistics remains high: four out of five people trust them. It’s politicians whose use of the information is questioned. The Department for Education has just had to acknowledge that the student satisfaction survey was not nearly robust enough to be used to assess university teachers’ excellence. The £350m NHS Brexit bonus was officially discredited. Politicians must behave better. Treating data with the proper respect is an important part of persuading people to adjust their prejudices to accommodate the facts.

The same issue has a letter with the same technique:  

For three years in the late 90s, Sergey Lavrov was my Russian counterpart when we represented our countries on the UN security council in New York. Despite some obvious policy differences, Lavrov never played the UK false; he was a serious and creative negotiator, with a good sense of humour and a passion for the English language and its literature. To decline Lavrov’s invitation for our new foreign secretary to visit Moscow (Report, 10 April), just when new tensions show such contacts are most needed, seems ill-advised. Hard too to square with the windy rhetoric, since the Brexit referendum, that Britain will re-emerge as a world power rejuvenated.

(my emphases)