'You do the propaganda --I just ask the questions'

This is a classic C4 News view of its own heroic stance on news presented by egregious newscaster K Gurumurthy (Krish)  last night, interviewing a Trump defender.

I know this blog is not about Trump,and God knows I don't want to defend him, but the liberal hysteria takes the same form as it did over Brexit. Liberals just cannot see why anyone can possibly disagree with them over Trump, and get positively nasty and panicky if anyone does.This makes them very vulnerable, but doesn't seem to have any lasting effect on their arrogance. Maybe Lukacs was right and they simply cannot escape their own ideologies? No wonder they hanker for strong men.

Liberal journalists have never done well against informed Trump defenders.A few years ago, S Gorka wiped the floor with a hapless E Davies on Newsnight simply by challenging the source of own of Davies's stories about Trump's intentions. Davies didn't know the source -- Islington dinner parties no doubt -- and Gorka pounced with a tirade about fake news. Davies didn't know that his previous interviewee was at the centre of a scandal (about scamming free tickets on an airline or something) either. That was all over the Web but had not got to Islington, obviously -- another easy goal for Gorka.

A couple of nights ago, M Frei of C4 News questioned a Trump-supporting lawyer about the new charges against him and was reminded that the US First Amendment guaranteed free speech. Slightly surprised, Frei tried to respond by saying it did not allow politicians to tell lies -- and was dismayed to hear that indeed it did, on the grounds that electorates should decide.

Last night, good old Krish tried again, haranguing and interrupting a Trump supporter as ever. The interview had been set up,again as ever, with clips of the Capitol riots of Jan 6th, intercut with Trump speaking, clearly implying Trump had instigated the riots (the 'insurrection' or even 'the coup', C4 had called it -- so had the BBC). News that Trump had been acquitted of impeachment citing that charge was not mentioned -- British liberals cannot believe it.

Krish was well into it, asking the (female) spokesperson if it could be right that a liar was still running for President. She reponded with citing the First Amendment (C4 never watch each other's broadcasts -- or again can't believe contrary answers?) and asked why KM was still pushing this propaganda even before the trial. Hence KM's reply.

He did try once more, asking (unwisely, with a condescending tone) if she had actually read the charges. Damn right she had, she retorted, and asserted that there was no mention in them of any actual law that had been broken. Obvioulsy outgunned, and perhaps to forestall any challenge as to whether he had read the charges, he terminated the interview.

Incidentally, an article in the Times today predicts the same sort of effect of liberal outrage and horror that happened with Brexit -- it makes people even more suspicious of liberals and, in this case,more likely to support Trump, and, longer term,more likely to see the whole system in partisan terms.

Revenge of the Remainers exposed

There have long been suspicions of the Remaineratis in high places working to get their own back -- classic 'woke' moral campaigns against Brexiteers in the Cabinet like Raab, and above all Johnson, of course.

Now another tentacle has emerged into the light with the debacle over the cancellation of a bank account at an elite bank (Coutts).The bank account is Nigel Farage's.

It is an odd tale all round. Would anyone normally care if anyone had their Coutts account cancelled? You need £1m to have an account there or £3m in investments or mortgage. But the nobs managed to score a massive own goal by cancelling Farage because the Chair of Coutts (or is it Natwest?) gossiped to a senior BBC journalist at a charity dinner that Farage's account had been cancelled because his assets had fallen below £1m, the failure.The journo rang the Chair to check next day.She confirmed. The story ran on BBC News. He claimed his business had been damaged -- and his reputation.

Little did they know the man. He got hold of Coutts' personal report on him and found they disapproved of him personally and politically in quite snobbish terms and claimed he would contravene their (mostly EDI) values. He publicised their report and caused a fuss, and gained a lot of public approval from people who responded to the issue that banks of all people should not really have these absurd moral missions, especially when they were taking serious cash from despotic regimes and making megabucks.

The parent bank of Coutts, NatWest,had been very unpopular in the Great Recession of 2008 under another name (RBS) and had been bailed out by the taxpayers (who still owned 40% of the shares).

The usual stupidity ensued. The leaker apologised.The Board of NatWest expressed full confidence in her. Some hours later she resigned.Some days later so did the Chair of Coutts.

The liberal press has been in a real dilemma over the whole thing. They can't support the banks who are widely detested. But the last thing they can do is support Farage.The result is a classic attempt to make it all into a Pyrrhic victory for Farage, as in today' s Observer

Whatever one thinks of Nigel Farage, back in the news for bringing about the resignation of NatWest’s chief executive Alison Rose and Coutts boss Peter Flavel, he has been instrumental in changing Britain 

Balance, you see. However, we must continue to remind the reader as strongly as possible that the chap is an utter bounder. Only we can see through him

An almost anachronistically English figure with his beer and blazers, his Carry On laughter and golf-club rhetoric...A virtuoso on the dog whistle...professional rabble-rouser... a gifted blamer of others... a serial loser in British politics...a born disrupter, a habitual fomenter of grievance with zero obligation to produce results...the loudmouth curmudgeon, the carefree voice of old fogeyism, the bar-room bore who thrives on the national stage...a consummate complainer, because his animating passion is to be against things... essentially a destructive talent....

Most curiously of all:

his populist opinions are not that popular with the British public [says an Observer journalist]

The Observer's sales were 136,656 in 2021 

Seven years on -- and some proper analysis

Excellent analysis of the  crisis today in The Full Brexit, especially the short and punchy piece originally published in the Northern Star by G Hoare, pointing to the 'zombification' of the British state as elites sought alliances with their European (and other international) allies and effectively abandoned the need to gain consensus within the national system.

This is a left-wing version to go along with the more familiar right wing 'replacing the electorate' variant which says the liberal petty-bourgeoisie also sought to use international governmental force to impose their worldviews and values by law, knowing they would never persuade the British electorate to adopt them by consent, so attempting to sidestep them. This is directed at all the woke stuff usually, but there is a hard core of 'modernisation' and marketisation.

Global capitalism and personal liberalism have always gone together, of course, as far as the very rich are concerned. 

The petite bourgeoisie hate both the proletariat below and the traditional elite above, and have them both on the list for the tumbrils, choosing targets by opportunity. 

Climate change might have disillusioned them with the globalists for now, but new solar technology and successful car batteries will win them over again no doubt.They will never forgive the proletariat, however, for their supposed (symbolic) racism or sexual intolerance.

Successfully 'developing a new relationship with Europe' for electoral purposes will probably mean adopting (private) human relations stuff, environmental protections (as long as it doesn't restrict agribusiness too much), and lots of other symbolic gestures -- flying Ukrainian flags alongside LGBTQIA+ ones? Increasing the number of celebratory minority days? Decolonising the high street?

Fall of Johnson -- Remainer orgasm

 Dear God it has been bad. I am no fan of Boris and I worried all along that Brexit was left in his hands, but his fall has encouraged the prats no end. Take this:

Brexit was Johnson and Johnson was Brexit. Now that he has gone, Britain must think again

The disgraced former PM and our disastrous exit from the EU were umbilically linked. His fall presents a precious opportunity

Part of this, but not all of it, is about the lies that were integral to both Brexit and Johnson’s fall....lies about Brexit were also the reason why he got into No 10 in the first place. His political banishment and humiliation for one set of lies ought to call into question his earlier political coronation for a different set.

these past few days are fundamentally about Brexit. Until recently, Brexit had become a taboo. It felt inevitable that a generation would have to pass before it was politically possible for a new form of relationship to be constructed with the EU that would undo the harm of the vote in 2016. Economic struggles, the challenges of climate and migration, and the war in Ukraine all make the need for that rebuilding more pressing. A steady shift in public opinion towards closer cooperation, followed by Johnson’s fall, now opens the door to a much more determined re-engagement....

the biggest lie that Johnson ever told, and the one that was most widely believed, was over Brexit. It has resulted in the largest piece of damage of the many he inflicted on the country. Johnson’s fall and unpopularity ought, therefore, to reopen Britain’s relationship with Europe. That is too big a question for this or any other future government to keep locked away in the too-difficult box. It is time, in other words, to take back control.

Pretty desperate stuff, indicated by the really sad links, even for a Graun journalist. They could never make up their mind if they hated Johnson more than Brexit, the upper-classes or the lower. 

The symbolic nature of the whole thing is still clear -- what on earth would  reopening the relationship with Europe actually mean? More free entry for European fruit pickers? Even cheaper strawberries (it's been a great crop this year). Purple passports again? Joining the Euro? More fees for the EC?

Selective statistics -- yet another example

We were assailed by yet another argument that Brexit has cost us dear this week, in a story reported widely and discussed solemnly as part of the growing luvvie consensus that it has all been a disaster.

Thank the Lord for Briefings for Britain again with this story today:

 

An updated paper from the CEP [Centre for Economic Performance at LSE] claims that 30% of the UK’s recent inflation was due to Brexit related non-tariff trade barriers. Catherine McBride reviews the trade data and finds that many other EU countries have seen similar increases in their food import costs, thus destroying the hypothesis that Brexit was the cause.  

...neither the newspaper journalists nor the economists at the CEP [thought]  to look at actual trade data from the EU food exporting countries...The CEP paper claims that UK food price rises would be 8 percentage points lower if the UK had remained in the EU. They blame this on the introduction of non-tariff barriers, but they come to this conclusion without looking at what has happened to the price of EU food exported to other destinations....food export prices have increased to most EU export markets, not just the UK....[Other]...potential reasons for price increases appear to have been overlooked by the CEP’s analysis. Price increases are rarely only about higher wholesale prices. 

 

However, there is still a cost of Brexit, estimated at £7bn overall since 2019. McBride argues that this arose because:

 

Many people mistakenly believed that the EU offered the UK ‘free trade’, but it didn’t. The UK had to pay for this access. This was doubly expensive as we were not only paying to give EU suppliers access to UK markets, but we also had to restrict UK market access to non-EU suppliers....Now companies that import or export goods to the EU must pay for their own compliance costs, just as they do when they trade with non-EU countries. These costs are probably passed on to UK consumers unless there is a competitive reason not to do so... So, it is possible that costs that were once part of the EU membership fee and so covered by UK government expenditure, are now being charged directly to UK consumers, but this is not an increased cost, in fact it is much less than our present membership fee would be if we were still EU members, we have simply changed how we pay it – at the supermarket till, rather than as tax.

Remaining EU regs-- what a good read!

God knows it's been a grim few weeks. The excellent Briefings for Britain this week has a link to a UK Government spreadsheet containing EU rules that are still in force. The context is the debate about whether we should remove them or not from UK legislation. Would you believe there is opposition to doing so?

The good people at Briefings... urge us to have a look at some and decide

 

Here is the Government link to the EU laws

Briefings for Britain case -- what effects of Brexit?

 Briefings for Britain (ne Brexit) has kept aloft the light all this time and has produced an admirable presentation of data, measurements on performance on various indices, making its case:

The conclusion is that Brexit has had little impact, either good or bad, and that the real factors affecting economic performance lie elsewhere and have been obscured.

For real nerds, there is a more substantial Report from the same authors.

Knighthoods all round!