Hedge funders for Boris

More on the latest try-out scandal (actually the very latest one is the story that Johnson groped a lady journalist at a dinner). Is Johnson a tool in the hands of hedge fund managers? Here is the case laid out in teh Graun:

Ex-top civil servant: Hammond was right to query no-deal backers

‘They are shorting the pound and the country’ warns Nick Macpherson of Boris Johnson’s hedge fund supporters

financial experts raise concerns over the PM’s links to the City...Nick Macpherson, former permanent secretary to the Treasury, said Hammond was right to question the political connections of some of the hedge funds with a financial interest in no deal...“Many hedge-fund managers see Brexit (including the no-deal variety) as an opportunity from which they obviously hope to profit, and they are positioning their portfolios accordingly,” said financial commentator and author Frances Coppola....Johnson received five-figure donations from several leading fund managers during the Conservative leadership race, some of whom also backed the Leave campaign....Odey Asset Management has taken short positions against homebuilder Berkeley Group and shopping centre landlord Intu. The property sector is seen as particularly vulnerable to a no-deal Brexit...City grandee and hedge fund manger Crispin Odey, who runs the fund, has publicly backed Boris Johnson and supported Brexit.

All pretty damning so far by Graun standards, even if we are far from detecting a smoking gun, but right at the end of the story it is  time to cover our backs:

The Financial Times has disputed the notion that a no-deal Brexit is a hedge fund conspiracy...“Equity outcomes are explicitly uncertain – what is a short position on a “no deal Brexit”? A short position on any company? A short position could also be a play on remain. For instance, a company might benefit from a stronger dollar, or less EU regulation,” FT Alphaville explained.

Meanwhile, a countersmear is reported quietly, but only after another shouty headline:

‘Surrender act’: Johnson ignores calls to restrain his language

Former minister David Gauke says No 10 should not ape Donald Trump’s tactics and language 

The former justice secretary, who had the whip withdrawn by Boris Johnson, responded with dismay to an anonymous briefing from someone in Downing Street that he and others had help from European Union countries in drafting the Benn Act to block a no-deal exit on 31 October...In an interview with Sky’s Sophy Ridge, Gauke said: “It’s not true, and I think here is a very good example of a No 10 briefing, using the word ‘collusion’ – and that’s a very potent word in itself – providing no evidence that there was anything like help with the drafting from foreign countries...“It’s not true, but even if it were true [!] the use of language of that sort is completely disproportionate, completely over the top, and feeds into this narrative that anyone who doesn’t agree with No 10’s position is somehow unpatriotic or betraying the country, or an enemy, or wanting the country to surrender.”

And then we drift back to the issue of beastly aggressive language. Now we have 'collusion' added to the list of forbidden words - should reduce the English vocabulary to Newspeak size in no time.

Now it's Brexiteer barricades funded by speculators

The headlines of the lead Observer story:

Boris Johnson ‘whipping up riot fears to avoid Brexit extension’

Labour claims that PM is aiming to invoke emergency powers using the Civil Contingencies Act

inciting violence by accusing Remainers of Brexit “surrender” and “betrayal”, Starmer said it was part of an orchestrated plan to stoke a sense of outrage among Leave voters and create civil unrest, so an extension might be avoided... 

There are other slightly less frightening possibilities, and lawyers must be rubbing their hands again:

“The Civil Contingencies Act is the only possible route I can imagine they can be thinking of,” Grieve said. “But if they do try to do this it would be a constitutional outrage. And if it passed through parliament it would be immediately challenged in the courts.”...John Major said he feared the Johnson government would try to bypass the Benn Act through an order of council. “It is important to note that an order of council can be passed by privy councillors – that is government ministers [only?]  – without involving HM the Queen,” he said, adding: “I should warn the prime minister that – if this route is taken – it will be in flagrant defiance of parliament and utterly disrespectful to the supreme court [who have only ruled on prorogation, though, not the Benn Act]. It would be a piece of political chicanery that no one should ever forgive or forget [ie it probably isn't actually illegal so we need bluster] .”

'Downing St sources said it was not planning to use the Civil Contingencies Act' which, under the recently re-popularised question about whether people have stopped beating their wives, means to Remainers that they ARE of course considering the other dodges. 

The other stories are running well. The Sunday Times is still banging on [!] about Johnson's alleged affairs,and there is also this one emerging from the undergrowth and already popular on my Facebook page:

Calls for inquiry into claims Johnson backers benefit from no-deal Brexit

Cabinet secretary urged to look into conflict of interest fears raised by Philip Hammond and Rachel Johnson

there may be a conflict of interest in Johnson’s acceptance of support from hedge funds that could gain from an economic shock....“Johnson is backed by speculators who have bet billions on a hard Brexit – and there is only one option that works for them: a crash-out no-deal that sends the currency tumbling and inflation soaring,” Hammond wrote in the Times....Guto Bebb, a former Tory minister who was thrown out of the party for opposing a no-deal Brexit, said: “The dubious financiers who supported the ‘leave’ campaign and the prime minister’s leadership campaign are betting against Britain.

There's a nice blurry smear to follow -- chap's a shagger so he must be a crook as well:

Anna Soubry, the leader of Change UK, said: “This week’s events are damning evidence that Boris Johnson has no moral compass. It gives me no pleasure to believe that Johnson is in hock to all manner of people and in particular those who don’t give a toss about the livelihoods of our constituents but simply get even more rich gambling on our children’s future.”

You can imagine their disappointment at the failure to convict Aaron Banks, of course. But if Governments were to be punished every time finance capitalists made money from their decisions, the courts would be busy 24/7. The nearest they can get to a smoking gun is this:

Hammond and his team [so no good just suing him for libel] have not named any individual donors. However, hedge fund managers have backed Johnson. One of those is Crispin Odey, a fund manager who has also previously backed Vote Leave and Ukip. Over the summer, it was reported that his fund had made a £300m bet against British businesses and stood to profit from an economic slump in the UK. However, the fund also backed other British companies.

And has anyone backed Remain?

Graun analyses polls (at last)

A welcome return to analysis in the Graun today in a longish discussion of opinion polls and their sources of error:

In 2017, Ipsos Mori found that 43% of people didn’t trust pollsters – an all-time high.[nice quirk to start with] ...For its phone polls, Ipsos Mori calls a mixture of landlines and mobiles that have been selected at random. What surprises me, sitting in the call centre, is just how hard it is to convince people to participate...some interviewers resort to a stiff, robotic delivery. Others make an effort to keep the interviews lively: one young man with jaunty diction, emphasises different words as he sets out the options on whether Britain will leave the EU without a deal: “Would you say it’s very unlikely, fairly unlikely…” It reminds me of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?....

It can take four or five days of polling to fill the final quota: 18- to 24-year-old men...It is no surprise, then, that almost all voting-intention polls now take place online. It is cheaper, easier and quicker [but you don't know who actually fills in the form]. Each agency has its own online panel: a group of people – more than 800,000, in the case of YouGov’s UK panel – who have agreed to take part in surveys, on politics or anything else, in exchange for a small payment....pollsters adjust their results through a process known as weighting: if they needed to poll 120 people aged 25 to 34, but could find only 100, for example, they will make each response in that age group count for 1.2 people....[OK, but if ther are only 50 people to extrapolate?]

The things that determine how people vote are always changing: to get a representative sample, pollsters must now pay particular attention to age, education, and, of course, views on Brexit.


Polling firms weight their results for turnout, too: they take into account what someone says about how likely they are to vote or whether they voted in the previous election.... Most polling firms weight their data according to how people voted in the previous general election – but it is impossible to weight by a vote for the Brexit party, because it only launched in April....“In my professional life, I’ve never known a time when voters have been so promiscuous with their votes,”

“We came to the conclusion that the underlying methodological problems of voting-intention polls are so fundamental that we can’t solve them,”  ...{another commentatror said] “In any case, if I predicted election results with a pin, I’d get it right half the time,” he says. Polling does have its uses, he concedes: it is effective at broadly gauging views on a wide range of subjects. But “the worst thing to use it for is predicting the results of elections.”

Guardian journalists need to be told. There are promises of further (pretty crackpot) dark arts:
 

Delta uses something it calls “emotional resonance scoring” (ERS). A traditional poll might ask someone how far they agree with a statement; ERS tries to determine the intensity of their feeling, by measuring how quickly – and therefore how emphatically – they respond to it....Other firms are also experimenting with cutting-edge techniques to complement traditional methods. They show people speeches by politicians, then measure their heart rate or monitor their facial expressions, which are then recorded using a webcam and analysed by an algorithm to see how intensely they react to the different messages. But when I speak to people in the industry, the development they appear to be most excited about is a kind of modelling called multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP), which YouGov used in the 2017 general election....In 2017, YouGov polled about 50,000 voters a week, across the country. With those results, it created different voter types...By estimating how many people in each voter type lived in a constituency, it was able to forecast a result for every seat.

Politicians seem especially gullible, although we only have the pollsters' word for that

In 2014, 12 days before the Scottish referendum, the Sunday Times ran a YouGov poll showing a two-point lead for independence. It was only one poll – an outlier – but it rattled Britain’s political establishment and compelled David Cameron to launch a final intervention: he promised to give the Scottish parliament more powers if Scotland voted to stay in the UK. And it was encouraging polls in the early months of 2017 that helped convince Theresa May to call a general election, with disastrous consequences.

Your coups tonight

There will be lots more attempts to 'seize control' of Parliament, the Graun says, probably approvingly:

Opposition MPs are planning to seize control of parliament next week potentially forcing the disclosure of more government documents, bringing a motion to censure Boris Johnson and strengthening legislation against a no-deal Brexit.

The common purpose is clear:

A Plaid Cymru source said opposition MPs were getting on better than expected. “It surprises all of us how easy these meetings are,” they said.

As we have always known -- stopping Brexit overrides all other considerations. But what is the constitutional position exactly? Who is actually responsible if there are (unintended) consequences from these actions, including financial ones? Who answers Parliamentary questions about them? How do they relate to party manifestos and election pledges?

Language games (but not Wittgensteinian ones)

Furore over last night's exchanges in Parliament. Divisive language was used! The Graun picks its favourite:

Boris Johnson has declined to apologise for his language about Jo Cox and ducked a Commons debate on inflammatory rhetoric, instead attending a meeting of Tory MPs to say he will continue to use the phrase “surrender bill” to refer to the act passed to avoid a no-deal Brexit.

What on earth did he say? That Jo Cox was a surrender monkey who deserved what she got? Worse?

In the Commons on Wednesday, he told one MP that her concerns about aggressive language fuelling violence were “humbug” and another that the best way to honour Cox was to “get Brexit done”.

The Guradian in one of its other articles about the scandal quoted the actual MP's speech:

“I genuinely do not seek to stifle robust debate, but this evening the prime minister has continually used pejorative language to describe an act of parliament passed by this house. And I’m sure you would agree, Mr Speaker, that we should not resort to using offensive, dangerous or inflammatory language for legislation that we do not like....“And we stand here, Mr Speaker, under the shield of our departed friend [the murdered MP Jo Cox] with many of us in this place subject to death threats and abuse every single day. And let me tell the prime minister that they often quote his words, ‘surrender’, ‘betrayal’, ‘traitor’, and I for one am sick of it. And it has to come from the prime minister first. So I would be interested in hearing his opinion, he should be absolutely ashamed of himself.”

This might risk being accused of opportunism or bad taste? Even the Graun quoted B Jenkins:

Sir Bernard Jenkin, a Eurosceptic backbencher, said MPs should not reference the murder of Jo Cox to “try and make political points”...MPs responded with shouts of outrageous when Jenkin said: “There is already a danger in these exchanges of it turning into a holier-than-thou competition...“I think we should reflect on how much unhappiness and anxiety there is among members of the House, and that this is going to be expressed in various ways, and people are going to use robust and emotive language in order to express their views, and that is entirely understandable...“Can I just make one request, that we no longer invoke the name of any person who has been the victim of attacks in order to try and make political points.”

But this was outweighed by the outrage, of course, gathered by the Grauun and helped on the way to becoming a ridiculous generalized moral panic with terms smeared from one object to another

As the woman who has taken over a seat that was left by our dear friend Jo Cox, can I ask him, in all honesty, as a human being, going forward, will he moderate his language so that we will all feel secure when going about our jobs.”...“The tone of the prime minister’s speech was truly shocking, and if he recognises that tensions are inflamed, it is up to him not to stoke them further by whipping up hatred, treating parliament with contempt and dividing our country still further... It takes a lot to reduce this honourable member to tears. I am not alone tonight; there are others who I believe have left the estate, such has been their distress....I may add that, today, I have reported to the police a threat against my child – and that [?] was dismissed as humbug.

P Toynbee is Queen of Outrage as usual:

...most shocking of all was not the prime minister but the wall of Conservative hoodlums whooping and cheering him on. Conservative? These are law-defying anarchists willing to stir up violence in the country....When confronted by female MPs warning him against using language that spurs on daily death threats to them and their children, that only added to his glee. Misogyny is part of his focus-grouped assault on every kind of political correctness, though it comes naturally to a man whose worst insult is “girly”....Some MPs were in tears.

.. this self-intoxicated scoundrel....calculated contempt for parliament and the judiciary...women especially will be revolted by his sneering contempt for violence against them....this brute...Johnson as the wild-man extremist....this unspeakable prime minister.

But Toynbee thinks that the reference to Brexit outweighs everything else in outrage:

The most grievous affront came in answer to Tracey Brabin, Jo Cox’s successor MP: “The best way to honour the memory of Jo Cox and indeed the best way to bring this country together would be, I think, to get Brexit done.”  

Others agree:

Johnson was even criticised by his own sister, Rachel, who told Sky: “I do think it was particularly tasteless for those grieving a mother, MP and friend to say the best way to honour her memory is to deliver the thing she and her family campaigned against....“

What he actually said was, first in response to the Labour MP's remarks:

“I think Mr Speaker, I have to tell you Mr Speaker, I have to say Mr Speaker, that I have never heard so much humbug in my life.”

And then, to the second MP: 

“But what I will say is that the best way to honour the memory of Jo Cox and indeed the best way to bring this country together would be, I think, to get Brexit done.”

In other outrages, the Attorney -General referred to the old trick of being asked whether you have stopped beating your wife. The reactions have been too predictable to bother recording

Boris the outlaw

A good day for G Miller and ScotNats. The Graun reoprts that::

The supreme court has ruled that Boris Johnson’s advice to the Queen that parliament should be prorogued for five weeks at the height of the Brexit crisis was unlawful....“This second success for our client Gina Miller in the supreme court is a testament to her resolve to take whatever steps are required to ensure executive overreach does not become a feature of our democracy.

Miller for PM then.

Slightly less comforting must have been this:

No evidence Leave. EU and Arron Banks broke law, says crime agency 

The inquiry concluded that Banks took a loan from Rock Holdings Ltd, which he owned, and was legally entitled to do so. He was also allowed as an individual to then give the money to Better for the Country Ltd, which administered the Leave.EU campaign....The NCA statement continued: “The NCA has not received any evidence to suggest that Mr Banks and his companies received funding from any third party to fund the loans, or that he acted as an agent on behalf of a third party...“There have also been media reports alleging that Mr Banks has been involved in other criminality related to business dealings overseas. The NCA neither confirms nor denies that it is investigating these reports.”

How the BBC responds to complaints

R Liddle and his supporters have had a complaint upheld about a Newsnight interview in which he was harangued by E Maitlis. She harangues most people she doesn't agree with, but Liddle or his supporters had enough persistence to get through what he calls the BBC's 'labyrinthine procedures' (where you have to persist through early stages in order to be allowed to proceed to Ofcom which alone gets the attention of the BBC). The actual report of the judgement appeared on the BBC Executive Committee's complaints reports website (the link given on an Ofcom document no longer works).

Newsnight, BBC Two, 15 July 2019: Finding by the Executive Complaints Unit

Complaint
The programme included a discussion about Brexit between Rod Liddle, columnist and author of a book about Brexit called “The Great Betrayal” and Tom Baldwin of the People’s Vote campaign. A viewer complained that the presenter Emily Maitlis was sneering and bullying towards Mr Liddle and in doing so exemplified the way the BBC views Leave voters.

Finding
The ECU did not agree that it was possible to deduce Emily Maitlis’ view on Brexit from the discussion. It also believed that it was valid to press Mr Liddle on his personal views  and noted that he had the opportunity to vigorously defend himself. However it was insufficiently clear that this was not Ms Maitlis’s view of Mr Liddle but that of his critics, and the persistent and personal nature of the criticism risked leaving her open to the charge that she had failed to be even-handed between the two guests.
Upheld

Action Point
The programme has been reminded of the need to ensure rigorous questioning of controversial views does not lead to a perceived lack of impartiality.    

Note the first class weasels. It was a mere 'a viewer', just one, who made this complaint. Eliding the complaint about Maitlis with an insupportable argument about how the whole BBC views all Leave voters guarantees a failure for any such complaint. Was this even a  specific complaint or a convenient portmanteau?

Indeed it may not be possible to deduce Maitlis's views from one discussion (especially if you don't try). They must have scores of complaints about other interventions but this one (edited?) complaint is all that is dealt with. Of course it is valid to press interviewees on their personal views -- but how are they to be pressed? With scorn,ridicule, scolding and textual shifters? Of course it was not clear whether Maitlis was pressing her own views or those of people she frequently claims she represents -- has she ever been questioned about where she gets this privileged insight into the views of 'others'?

So 'the' criticisms were 'persistent and personal', whoever they came from, but what a damp squib of a conclusion -- she risked being open to a charge. She has not even actually faced a charge! About that charge itself, the BBC says nothing, as ever.

Another solution suggests itself -- write to the Times (26 September Readers' Letters) : 

Sir, Are we now to accept parliamentary-style hysterics from BBC interviewers as a matter of course? The hectoring and accusatory approach of Emily Maitlis towards the Conservative MP Bernard Jenkin on Wednesday night was unworthy of an otherwise intelligent and excellent Newsnight host. I am no fan of Mr Jenkin but the aggressive approach of Ms Maitlis (and indeed other BBC journalists) is contributing to the lowest level of political debate that I have ever witnessed.
Robert Carter
Heswall, Wirral

PS In the very latest twist, Maitlis has lent her voice to those critcising another judgment (rather a rapid and unmealy-mouthed one) by the BBC Complaints Dept about N Munchetty voicing her opinions about Trump's motives to a storm of protest. It all goes to show how “massively out of touch with the real world” the Executive Complaints Unit is, says Maitlis. Unfortunately, the Observer reminded us that 

Earlier this month the ECU upheld a complaint about Maitlis “sneering and bullying” during a Newsnight discussion with the newspaper columnist Rod Liddle.

On the other stage...

While the Graun waits and hopes that the Supreme Court will declare Johnson's prorogation illegal, it keeps faith with its readership with reminders of another cause dear to their hearts and thrilling predictions of another drastic shortage of fresh food:

A fifth of UK fresh food imports from areas at risk of climate chaos, MPs warn 

Of course,there is a chance to connect these issues up:

In the very near future, people would be at risk from sudden lurches in food prices if a no-deal Brexit resulted in trouble with imports, including higher costs, delays and shortages.

And the usual folk kept their eye on the main chance:

“[We need] good farmers to be paid to produce more diverse and better food and to reduce reliance on vulnerable overseas suppliers,” Hird [a 'farming campaigner'] said. 

Elsewhere, there is some amusing wriggling over the Guardian Reading Group's choice of a book of the month:

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is charming, but it is also racist 

Several frightful passages are then quoted. Presumably, Graun people did not read the book that carefully in the first place? Luckily, there is a liberal option in this case, if not in others:

[It is] a book that is, for most of its 233 pages, a light, frothy delight and widely loved as a feelgood read

Shorn of context, it’s easy to see why these quotes cause offence. Even with context, they’re hard to forgive, and I don’t want to. This book was published in 1938. That kind of talk wasn’t just morally poisonous. Jewish people were already being murdered and losing their rights in Nazi Germany, and refugees were being turned away at international borders....There’s no point in pretending that antisemitism was not common in genteel prewar Britain, or in denying that the characters in a delightful novel would share those opinions. (The characters’ beliefs as distinct from the author’s.) These snatches of dialogue may upset us but also be accurate to their world. What are we to make of the fact that Watson was prepared to disfigure her otherwise beautiful creation with those lines quoted above? Should our political and moral objections to those passages alter our reading of the rest of the book?

My general conclusion is that you can call out racism in a book without consigning it to history. We don’t have to like these things being said, but we should know about them....if you start blacklisting writers such as Winifred Watson for letting her characters say reprehensible things, where do you stop?...Such abstract arguments are very distant from the real hurt that those lines I’ve quoted can cause. I still find them repulsive. But to accept that a book has imperfections is not the same as endorsing them. The world is complicated and so is literature – even when it’s supposed to be fun.

Perfectly reasonable arguments but I don't think we usually hear them in the Graun except to sneer at them as pathetic justifications for irredeemable flaws. Outraged virtue signalling is so much more fun.

Old standby reappears -- house prices plummet!!

They have been predicting this since the referendum, but now there might be some evidence for a fall in house prices. The shock news requires a couple of amplifications. First, a headline scaring us that this is the

first September fall in house prices since 2010 

So a fall in one month breaking a 9 year trend. But a large fall nevertheless?

the average price of newly listed homes fell by 0.2%, or £730, compared with August.

Pretty much within the range of error for these estimates then? But we should all stay scared because:

Last Monday, the accountancy firm KPMG warned that UK house prices could fall by as much as 20% if Boris Johnson pursues a no-deal Brexit. The biggest falls would be in London and Northern Ireland, it said.

Project Fear masquerading as news as ever. I also like the customary weasel --if he 'pursues' a no deal, not actually gets one. So it is uncertainty and the operations of a few chancers trying to make a few bob out of it?

Back in Graunland there as, as ever, equally important issues:

Can a disco-house haven bring queer culture to Ibiza?

 

On other pages...

I sometimes worry I am too focused onBrexit and thus missing the orher major issues. Thank God for the Graun then.

For this:

#MeToo: the ‘unprecedented’ movement that launched a wave of books 

{my emphasis]

And this 

Why, this year, Last Night of the Proms will be woke 

 

I could have sworn I saw an item on massaging dogs with blueberries but I can't find it now.  I wanted to check if it was a part of Operation Fear, after the Co-op predicted shortages of blueberries.

Legal niceties -- pshaw!

The Graun comforts its readers by promising really difficult times ahead when they can constantly say they told us so.  A 'senior civil servant at DexEU until March this year' --ie one of those plotting a mere KitK at Brexit until rumbled said:

“It is not a clean break: what it does is it takes us legally out of the EU. But what it can’t do is undo all of the very close economic ties that we have with the EU, on which so much of our trade as a country depends. And nor would we want to undo all of the close security ties that we have with the EU,”... He said claims his erstwhile colleague Olly Robbins had sought to stymie the government’s negotiating efforts were “complete nonsense”. [By the way, O Robbins has now 'taken a job at the investment bank Goldman Sachs.']

As usual, he just cannot see the point of any merely legal autonomy, or reversion to normal forms of trading and cooperation:

“And because of the importance of those ties both for the EU and the UK, it will remain hugely important to have those expressed through a formal relationship

Naturally, as a bureaucrat, he wants to go further:

as a minimum, some of the procedures, not least in the Houses of Parliament, are going to have to be codified for clarity on what the rules are

Nothing whatsoever to do with his sympathy for Remainer manoeuvring of course. Surely he would never lie to teh Guardian 

J Freedland can always be relied upon to support the latest wheezes and talk up thrilling crises. The written constitution long-game ploy is gaining ground, after years of quiet complacency by liberals, of course:

John Bercow is surely right [could have ended the sentence there] to suggest that, once this Brexit crisis has passed, a written constitution will be essential, one that would spell out the limits on executive might – stripping the prime minister of, for example, the power to suspend parliament.

After all:

as Prof Meg Russell of UCL’s Constitution Unit puts it: “The political constitution cannot operate properly if parliament is not sitting.” Under our system, parliamentary sovereignty is the whole shooting match: it is the constitution. “If you shut parliament, it’s very hard to say your constitution is working.”

So Parliament wasn't working during the 5 week summer vacation or during the other breaks, including those for party conferences.Parliament is the only location for Government work? That helps beef up the quinquennial vote as the very essence of democracy of course. But the first story raises a few problems for that view I would have thought...

Now it's a Speaker coup

The Graun reports the retiring Speaker's latest stop Brexit ploy:

John Bercow has threatened Boris Johnson that he will be prepared to rip up the parliamentary rulebook to stop any illegal attempt by the prime minister to take the UK out of the EU without a deal on 31 October...In a direct warning to No 10, the Speaker of the House of Commons said he is prepared to allow “additional procedural creativity” if necessary to allow parliament to block Johnson from ignoring the law...“If we come close to [Johnson ignoring the law], I would imagine parliament would want to cut off that possibility … Neither the limitations of the existing rulebook or ticking of the clock will stop it doing so,” he said, delivering the annual Bingham lecture in London. “If I have been remotely ambiguous so far, let me make myself crystal clear. The only form of Brexit that we have, whenever that might be, will be a Brexit that the House of Commons has explicitly endorsed.”

Since this House of Commons at least has refused to endorse any kind of Brexit, this means he is willing to stop Brexit.The article goes on to say that he also wants a written constitution to 'stop “executive malpractice or fiat”'. It should stop any particular Speaker's 'additional procedural creativity' as well

There has also been a response to the latest EC ambitions to maintain European culture. D Trilling writes:

How would you define the “European way of life”? What unique, homogenous culture is shared by people who live in Bolton, Palermo or Plovdiv – but not those who live outside Europe? And what threatens it so profoundly that the European Union has this week nominated a minister with responsibility for defending it?

Good questions.They might well be asked of Remainer ideology.

Just asking these questions shows what a fatuous and deeply sinister stunt it was...

And with a more sinister purpose for Trilling:

What supposedly threatens the “European way of life”, according to the commission, is migration – the new role incorporates the duties of the previous migration commissioner, bundling together the responsibility for controlling Europe’s external borders with security, employment and education...this is about more than language: European commissioners are the EU’s executive branch, and its most powerful officials; they draft laws and see that treaties are enforced....Since the Brexit referendum, the EU, especially among liberals, has often been held up as the antidote to nationalism. Yet for all its laudable aims – and its successes in reducing conflict between states – it plays host to its own, pernicious kind of civilisational chauvinism

It's deeper still:

the sociologist Sivamohan Valluvan argues in a thought-provoking new book, Europe is experiencing its third historic surge of nationalism...The long history of ideas about European superiority, and the racist logic through which they were enforced, cannot be ignored here.

It is understandable that people in Britain might feel there are more pressing issues than appointments in Brussels. But the rightwards drift of the commission has an important connection to our own arguments about Brexit. The question of the UK’s future relationship with the EU has to be more than a choice between fighting to remain within an unchanged Fortress Europe, or leaving to create our own Fortress Britain instead.

Nasty dilemma indeed.Thank goodness there are other things to worry about:

He, she, they … should we now clarify our preferred pronouns when we say hello?

EU supports Boris

Or so it seems from el grudina today:

Leaked resolution says MEPs will use veto against any Brexit deal without a backstop

And there is another emerging issue too:

The [EU] parliament’s resolution “expresses its concern at the implementation of the UK’s settlement scheme and the high levels of applications … who are only accorded pre-settled status”.

Just what Johnson wants, surely, if the Graun is right about his real ambition to leave without a deal and blame the EC. However, Euromachinations might point elsewhere:

the parliament says it is open for such a Brexit delay if there is to be a general election or second referendum.

Meanwhile, now it is our blueberries that are under threat:

The boss of the Co-op has warned that a no-deal Brexit could lead to fresh food shortages and higher prices in supermarkets...Steve Murrells said the product area he is most worried about is fruit...Murrells said the convenience chain was using extra warehouse space to stockpile long-life products such as water, toilet paper and canned goods – but the pinch point was fresh food, particularly soft fruits such as blueberries, and also apples and pears

Outbreaks of scurvy all round then? It might not be that bad:

To avoid empty shelves the Co-op said it would resort to using air freight to bring in fruit. The retailer sells only British meat so its supply lines would not affected by the UK crashing out of the trading bloc.

In Ireland, says O'Gordy

The Irish Fiscal Advisory Council said a large budget deficit could emerge with the tax take down and spending increased to cushion the blow to agriculture, tourism and other industries....At Dublin Castle, the agriculture minister, Michael Creed, conceded that the all-island agri-food sector could be in serious trouble if the UK crashes out....Varadkar confirmed for the first time that there would be checks on goods coming across the Northern Ireland border. “Some may need to take place near the border” rather than on the border but most would be in ports, airports and at businesses....Irish businesses are demanding £1bn to mitigate the Brexit shock.

Thank goodness Guardian life goes on in metropolitan areas:

Asymmetric jeans: will you wear the trousers that are flared one side, skinny the other?

Pay day!

For lawyers that is. The grun is delighted to report that:

Scottish judges rule Boris Johnson's suspension of parliament unlawful 

Lawyers acting for 75 opposition MPs and peers argued Johnson’s decision to suspend parliament for five weeks was illegal and in breach of the constitution, as it was designed to stifle parliamentary debate and action on Brexit.

The Government intends to appeal 

Meanwhile, the EC is under new management and is already extending its ambitions:

The European commission’s incoming president has been pilloried for giving the EU’s most senior official on migration the job title “Protecting our European Way of Life”...Sophie in ‘t Veld, a Liberal MEP who also works on migration law, said the decision was misguided and urged Von der Leyen to withdraw the title. “The very point about the European way of life, is the freedom for individuals to choose their own way of life,” she said. “We do not need a commissioner for that, thank you very much....The commission will also have vice-presidents in charge of, “A Stronger Europe in the World”, “Europe Fit for a Digital Age” and “Democracy and Demography”...The fuzzy aspirational titles contrast with the outgoing commission, which uses prosaic factual terms, such as “foreign policy and security” or “digital single market”.

Elsewhere, G Monbiot delivers a penetrating critique of neoliberalism and says:

Neoliberalism is the ideology developed by people such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. It is not just a set of free-market ideas, but a focused discipline, deliberately applied around the world. It treats competition as humanity’s defining characteristic, sees citizens as consumers and “the market” as society’s organising principle. The market, it claims, sorts us into a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Any attempt by politics to intervene disrupts the discovery of this natural order. [hence the European Court of Justice] ...It was embraced by Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and most subsequent governments. They sought to implement the doctrine by cutting taxes, privatising and outsourcing public services, slashing public protections, crushing trade unions and creating markets where markets did not exist before. The doctrine was imposed by central banks, the IMF, the Maastricht treaty and the World Trade Organization. By shutting down political choice, governments and international bodies created a kind of totalitarian capitalism.

Any (!) readers will notice that the EC is included in the list but in an odd way -- 'the Maastricht treaty'. It gets more apologetic. Monbiot argues that 'neoliberal ultras [in the UK Government], and Brexit is a highly effective means of promoting this failed ideology.' An even more masterful matador manoeuvre ends the piece:

the professor of political economy Abby Innes argues, neoliberalism has reached its Brezhnev phase: “ossification, self-dealing, and directionless political churn”. Like Leninism, neoliberalism claims to be an infallible science. Its collision with the complexities of the real world has caused political sclerosis of the kind that characterised the decline of Soviet communism. As a result, “the only way to complete this revolution today is under cover of other projects: Brexit is ideal”.

So neolibs, having driven the Maastricht Treaty, now move on to UK nationalism to avoid bureaucratic stagnation? But not French or German nationalism or is that next? Monbiot has to defend this view by saying:

[Johnson] rages against red tape, but the real red tape is created by the international trade treaties he favours, that render democratic change almost impossible, through rules that protect capital against popular challenge, and shift decision-making away from parliaments and into unaccountable offshore courts (“investor-state dispute settlement”). This explains the enthusiasm among some on the left for Brexit: a belief that escaping from the EU means escaping from coercive trade instruments. In reality, it exposes us to something even worse, as the UK enters negotiations with the US, holding a begging bowl.

The BuzzFeed article on investor-state dispute settlement is indeed alarming, although focused on US dealings with dodgy plutocrats in Central American or Middle Eastern states. I could see no comment on the EC, and certainly not any support for the view that the EC would protect us from this development, if anything can.  Maybe it will prefer its own unelected legal bodies to do the job?

So --much to agree with, of course, but what a strangely selective target.Is the EC going to prevent ossification with its belief in infallible government? Has it eased market forces and protected trades unions? Does it stand against totalitarian capitalism? Monbiot just seems to  prefer European neoliberalism to US neoliberalism.

It's far worse than Monbiot thinks. There are no simple alternatives to neoliberalism  and the only issue is whether international legal and political federations of capitalists will be worse than their existing networks and connections. Difficult choice -- but I'm for removing that additional 'European' protective layer of bureaucratic rationalism and its sad social liberal ideology.

Petit-bourgeois enjoy emotional release -- and fantasy

Johnson lost a vote to call an early General Election, and then prorogued Parliament.The result, according to the Gruy was 'chaos':

Five-week suspension begins with shouts, singing and signs reading ‘silenced’  

Several MPs were also involved in an altercation near the Speaker’s chair, as they attempted to prevent him leaving his seat and attending the House of Lords,...One Labour MP threw himself across Bercow’s chair in protest at the shutting down of parliament...Lewis tweeted that the group of MPs had been trying to re-enact an event from 1629 when the Speaker was pinned to his chair to prevent the prorogation of parliament.

Labour MPs, who remained in their seats after government MPs and the Speaker had left to attend the House of Lords, sang the Red Flag, SNP MPs Scots Wha Hae and Plaid Cymru MPs Calon Lân, with harmonies.

Parliament also voted by 311 to 302 for Johnson to publish Operation Yellowhammer documents detailing the government’s no-deal Brexit plans, after a leaked version from early August warned of possible food and medicine shortages...The motion, brought by the former Tory MP Dominic Grieve, also directed Johnson to disclose messages relating to the suspension of parliament sent by his senior adviser, Dominic Cummings and various other aides on WhatsApp, Facebook, other social media and both their personal and professional phones. Grieve said he had information from public officials that such correspondence contained a “scandal”.

Meanwhile, the Times has a feature and Times 2 spread [subscription] on 'grab bags' [known in my day as 'bug out bags' and confined to the loony fringe of survivalists).

[It was] started by, of all people, the British police. A number of forces put out messages and videos urging people to gather the contents for an emergency “grab bag”. In a tweet hashtagged BePrepared, Police Scotland urged us to get packing. “September is preparedness month. Emergencies can happen at any time and it’s recommended to have a #GrabBag ready containing essential items including medication, copies of important documents, food/water, torch, radio and other personal items.” An accompanying diagram of a backpack included, among other things, a whistle, a radio and a first aid kit. Other forces put out videos....The tweets sparked an immediate reaction, ranging from panic and puzzlement to satire and outright mockery. 

not everyone thinks that serious grab-baggers are sad sacks. “I have both a grab bag and a contingency of where I will go with my family,” says Ben Fogle, the explorer and TV presenter. [But} “I think it’s bollocks,” says David Hempleman-Adams, the polar adventurer, mountaineer and record-breaking balloonist. “If you are on a sailing boat it’s common sense to have a grab bag so you’ve got all the stuff if you hit a whale or you are in a storm. You always take emergency stuff if you are on a mountain. “But you see a ‘grab bag for Brexit’ and you think: ‘This is just a money-making thing.’ ”...

If you want one but can’t be bothered to prepare it yourself, you can always buy one from Bushcraft Lab, a Cambridge company that offers a Two-Person SHTF (shit hits the fan) emergency bag for £219.99....“There’s a certain type of person that gets into this,” says Gareth Macfarlane, who owns the outfitter. “Wargamers, that type of guy, who lives with their parents. They tend to be into the prepper kind of thing.”...Although his bags have been steady sellers, in the past six months demand has dried up and he hasn’t flogged a single grab bag. Perhaps all this grab-bag talk will be a boon for his business. “I’m waiting for it to implode on Brexit and I will be laughing,” he says.