EU cannot betray 'increasing majority' who want UK to remain, says Tusk
EC president hails those who marched against Brexit and millions who petitioned to revoke article 50
The actual context referred to Tusk saying that if the UK had to take part in European elections after a loing delay to Brexit, that would be inconvenient but necessary because of this 'increasing majority'.
On the democratic option of just revoking Article 50, it is interesting to see the SNP in full support, while at the same time lobbying for another binding referendum on Scottish independence. The Government has apparently emailed all those who signed the petition (including the underage, the disqualified and the fake?) that:
“Revoking article 50 would break the promises made by government to the British people, disrespect the clear instruction from a democratic vote, and in turn, reduce confidence in our democracy.”
Meanwhile, A Chakrabortty is pushed up to attack one of the enemies of the petit-bourgeoisie, this time the upper classes:
the UK stands on the verge of a calamity as great as any since the war....And where are our political classes?...Sunday afternoon was Theresa May’s crisis summit at Chequers, to which Iain Duncan Smith came as Toad of Toad Hall, complete with open-top vintage sports car and cloth cap. Jacob Rees-Mogg’s chosen passenger was his 12-year-old son, Peter, because a national crisis evidently created the perfect occasion for bring-your-child-to-work day. Boris Johnson rocked up in his Spaffmobile before chuntering back to London to publish a column dumping all over the woman with whom he’d just been talking, dubbing her “chicken” and saying she had “bottled it”. (One of the columns, if it’s not too unseemly to mention, for which the Telegraph pays him £275,000 a year.) The BBC reports that these men refer to themselves as the Grand Wizards. Since that is an honorific used by the Ku Klux Klan, the best can be said is they have put as much thought into their nicknames as they ever did into the Irish backstop.
This is how today’s governing classes comport themselves, while the country teeters on the edge of a cliff...a fundamental trend in public life that is utterly corrosive....today’s political elite are strangers to collective interest or public responsibility...myopic cynicism...profound unseriousness...In his essential recent book Reckless Opportunists, [there is, naturally, a book to plug] Aeron Davis charts the breadth and the depth of this betrayal.[ He writes of] a generation of leaders who are “precarious, rootless and increasingly self-serving”. They grab whatever they can – be that cheap headlines or fast money – and then crash out, even while loosening the very foundations of the institutions entrusted to them. Crucially, this is a genre of politics that relies on a strong state even as it bilks it of the necessary tax revenue...moneyed nihilism.
we need a wholesale reimagining of our institutions so that they better serve the rest of us, rather than just those who run them. This was one of the promises of the leave campaign, of course [so there is some leftwing case for Brexit?] , but it was always destined to be folded and put away inside the pocket of one of Rees-Mogg’s double-breasted jackets...Chaos and authoritarianism are fine, it appears, as long as they prove good for asset prices. In that elision between morality and financial returns is much that’s gone wrong with the governing classes
Strong analysis of the ruling class, even if a bit moralistic -- but what on earth is the connection to weak petty Remainering and identity politics?
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