Brexit

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Re: Brexit

Postby Pedgerow » Tue Nov 05, 2019 10:30 pm

At midnight tonight, parliament will be dissolved in anticipation of the general election that will take place on the 12th of December. Nobody posted here that that would happen: perhaps you guys, like the British people, think that a general election is a complete and utter waste of time in every conceivable way. But there's going to be one anyway. The Conservatives are pushing the "get Brexit done" line, Labour want a new referendum but what they really want is to be in power, the Liberal Democrats want to just cancel Brexit altogether without asking anyone (what is it about the Liberal Democrats and policies that are guaranteed to lead to rioting in the streets?), and the Brexit Party are saying that Conservative Brexit isn't real Brexit and we need to go No Deal to achieve the glorious freedom that we voted for. Nobody really knows who will win, but most predictions are that things will turn out exactly the same, with a minority Conservative government that can't actually achieve anything.

In other Brexit news, Speaker of the House of Commons John Bercow, the international celebrity, anti-Brexit troll, and absolute hero of the Remain cause, has kept his promise to step down and presumably head off into the private sector to stack dolla dolla billz daily. He has been replaced by Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the former Deputy Speaker. He is reportedly a lovely man, but I'm concerned because he has a very strong rural Lancashire accent, and most people who sound like him are the absolute most ardent Brexiteers in the entire country. I guess that makes me racist against places like Burnley and Blackburn and Colne and all these other awful-sounding towns. So that's awkward. Hopefully Sir Lindsay Hoyle will indeed be a lovely man, and I can pretend I never worried about this.

So far, Sir Lindsay has gone viral with a bizarre tweet in which he showed his support for the England rugby team in the most staged photo of all time. It's incredible. Please check it out.
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Re: Brexit

Postby NathanLoiselle » Wed Nov 06, 2019 2:09 am

Perhaps no one had a chance to comment on it yet. Except you of course.
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Re: Brexit

Postby Pedgerow » Wed Nov 06, 2019 10:14 pm

It was announced a little over a week ago. The vote in which MPs agreed to have a new election appears to have taken placed on the 29th of October. This could arguably have been a crucial moment in the Brexit saga, except, of course, I don't think it will be. Lots of people are expecting another hung parliament, and I can't see any giant crushing victories on the horizon for either Leave or Remain, so we'll have ourselves a new government that's exactly the same as this one (because Jeremy Corbyn won't win either). From there, I'll have my fingers crossed for a new referendum, but there seems to be a lot of opposition to that as well. According to Professor Sir John Curtice, the British Nate Silver or whatever his name is, there isn't really majority support for anything, but people would rather have an election than a referendum unless they have to choose between the two and can't choose neither, in which case they prefer a referendum. Clear as mud! No wonder we're all doomed.

Meanwhile, there is a report into whether or not there was Russian interference in the Brexit referendum, and this report won't be released until after the election, even though there's no reason to keep it a secret. Now, I wouldn't go so far as to say there was a deliberate conspiracy by evil rogue states to make people support Brexit, but if I was Russia and I wanted to completely destabilise the European Union and neutralise one of its key players by sowing enmity and infighting and distrust among its people, then if I succeeded, it sure would look a lot like this. The Russians must be delighted that all this has happened by pure coincidence, completely on its own.
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Re: Brexit

Postby Piter Lauchy » Thu Nov 07, 2019 1:08 am

Pedgerow wrote:So far, Sir Lindsay has gone viral with a bizarre tweet in which he showed his support for the England rugby team in the most staged photo of all time. It's incredible. Please check it out.

To anyone who hasn't looked at this, I implore you to do so. The memeability is through the roof and, of course, it's already begun. I'm a big fan of this one:

Spoiler: show
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Re: Brexit

Postby Pedgerow » Tue Jan 14, 2020 3:04 am

It's been a little over a month since the election result (in fact, you might now be more interested in the election's Wikipedia page instead), and I never came here to complain because, like the rest of the Remain side, the prevailing attitude was one of stunned silence. This is the issue that defined the entire decade of the 2010s in this country (the referendum was in 2016, but that was only after a few years of people demanding it), and for the first time since everything went mad, we finally have convincing political closure. At last, we know what's going to happen, and instead of conflict and perpetual disagreement which honestly felt like the build-up to a civil war at times, so intractable was this issue, my entire side has been profoundly obliterated. We've been steamrollered and downright wiped out. On the 11th of December 2019, the Remain side was the terrifying kaiju enemy of democracy, stomping through cardboard Tokyo with our messages of unity and prosperity and openness. On the 13th of December, we were a couple of twitching severed tentacles and a giant bloodstain. What the hell do you say in that situation?

(Side note: As it happens, more people actually voted for Remain parties. Here are some links. But the first-past-the-post electoral system is horseshit, designed specifically to fuck over smaller parties. The big parties stay big, and the small parties can drink Boris's cold piss forever. It's such a complete outrage that Nigel Farage, architect of Brexit and surprisingly principled man, agrees with this and is just as angry that UKIP, followed by the Brexit Party, have been screwed over harder than any other party in history about this. As a result, he has said that once Brexit is done, the Brexit Party will rebrand itself as the Reform Party, to campaign for electoral reform so that smaller parties stand a chance. Given that Nigel Farage has a phenomenal track record of persuading an entire country to obsess over a previously minor political detail that didn't really matter to anyone, he's an excellent man to have on our side. If it wasn't for his policies, I'd vote for him. If he adopts good policies that I like, I will be delighted. Three cheers for my #1 mortal enemy!)

But anyway. After the election, there were a lot of questions: "Why did Labour do so badly?" Dozens of left-wing commentators, both reasonable and insufferable, came forward with their own theories about why constituencies that had never voted for anyone other than Labour suddenly decided to oppose the redistribution of wealth and vote for the party of the Great Satan who had closed all their coal mines, annihilated the local economies of their entire regions, and plunged everyone they'd ever met into decades of inescapable destitution that continues to this day. How could Jeremy Corbyn be worse than that? Now, I have my own theory, but it's definitely worth pointing out that these commentators all made very cogent points, and they each blamed some other element of the current Labour Party. Was it the stance on Brexit? Was it the allegations of anti-Semitism? Was it a widespread conspiracy by the hated mainstream media? Was it Jeremy Corbyn himself, the man who invited the IRA to the House of Commons after the Brighton bombing, who was repeatedly photographed laying wreaths at the graves of dead terrorists, and who broke political tradition with such classic quotes as "Hamas are my friends"? The fact that each and every one of those points is entirely valid makes it impressive that anybody voted for Labour at all. Obviously, Labour supporters might dispute the validity of the accusations of anti-Semitism, but on an unrelated note, here's a link about the dreaded Jews being responsible for Labour's defeat (warning: I looked for Labour supporters blaming the Jews and picked the first link I found; you probably shouldn't click that because it might well be a genuinely anti-Semitic website).

Even my militantly pro-Corbyn social media bubble shifted noticeably in tone in the lead-up to the election. In 2017, and 2015, it had mostly been "Glorious Corbyn will bring justice to the downtrodden, and we are all downtrodden and will remain so until we elect the mighty JC to smite our enemies", or words to that effect. This election, it was mostly words to the effect of, "You don't have to like him, you just have to vote for him." Hardly a ringing endorsement from his biggest fans there.

I said above that I had my own theory about why Labour bit the dust so hard. I'm really proud of it so I hope you haven't stopped reading yet. I don't think this election was entirely about Brexit, or the NHS, or whether or not we want to be the sort of country that would elect either Boris or Corbyn. It wasn't a battle between metropolitan elites and "real people", or a class war, or racism vs tolerance. It was, in the end, the final showdown between people who like politics and people who fucking hate politics. Just look at the Conservative campaign: all they ever said was "Get Brexit Done". That was their slogan, and they repeated it so frequently, in response to literally any question, that it must have felt downright embarrassing to some of the more normal Conservatives. They didn't threaten that Jeremy Corbyn would sell your house and send you to a gulag, as they have in the past, but instead they threatened "dither and delay" with the utterly baseless claim of "two more referendums in 2020". The Conservatives never said they were good; they just said that if you elected them, you wouldn't have to worry about any more voting. Fuck your involvement in democracy; you've had your vote and Boris is now King. Hope you like the taste of rich people's feet. Even Boris Johnson's New Year message features the promise of "no more elections, no more referendums" (at 1:57).

And people voted for it! That's what they appear to have wanted! And I, meanwhile, love voting. I'd have a referendum on everything if I could. The government could ring me up every night and ask me to get involved with every single law that gets passed, and I would do it till the day I died. It's direct democracy, baby, and it's delicious. I love it. And whenever there is an election, I always pick the loser. I voted for Change UK in the European elections back in May; look how they did. So Boris Johnson was offering us the chance to never have to vote again until I'm 37 years old, and of course I found that abhorrent. But everyone else seems to have loved it. Meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn's stance on Brexit was to "renegotiate a credible new deal, then put it to the people in another referendum with the option to Remain also on the ballot paper". That's an abysmal campaign slogan, yes, but it shows he loves democracy. And indeed, if you ever asked him for any kind of leadership, old Jezza would umm and ahh and invite you to the library to go looking for the best possible answer. Again, it's great, and everyone should be like that, but it's not leadership, is it? You might as well have no Prime Minister at all at that point. So I suspect that the message from the people was not, "We love the philandering liar and international laughing-stock", nor was it, "We really hate communism and immigrants", but it was just, "For the love of God, change the record already. Shut up; I'm begging you. Just leave us alone."

This would also explain how Boris Johnson managed to win an election in spite of all his catastrophes. He refused to participate in multiple interviews because he might be asked (gasp!) difficult questions. Every prospective leader always does these interviews as part of their campaigning, except Boris who pussied out continuously because he is a little bitch. When the Labour manifesto was published, the Conservative Party registered a fake website to deceive people looking for the real manifesto. They did this mere days after rebranding their own press office's Twitter account as an independent fact checker, which obviously posted pro-Conservative, anti-Labour messages which were not independent at all. The party we now have in government are effectively a party of cyber-squatters. They're one step above installing ransomware on all our computers. But, most importantly, remember that if you don't follow politics that closely, because you hate it, all of this will have passed you by. If you don't watch or read the news, you won't have seen Boris Johnson hide in a fridge to avoid an interviewer. He could have shat his pants in every single debate, and I mean literally soiled himself, and done the rest of the debate dressed as an adult baby, but what ratings do these debates get? A lot of people don't watch them. Most people don't watch them. And that's who Boris Johnson was targeting. And it worked, because a lot of people really just don't like politics the way anyone still reading this now likes politics.

So what now for Brexit? The Withdrawal Agreement has been passed by Boris's "stonking majority", and we're outta the EU at the end of this month. Then, we have a transition period of the rest of this year to renegotiate all our deals with the EU. In theory, if we can't do this, we will have a no-deal Brexit after all. And head of the EU Ursula von der Leyen says doing this is effectively impossible. So that's not ideal if you want the British economy to do well. But the EU have been very patient with us, and Boris abandoned the red line about the border in the Irish Sea to get a backstop agreement in place, and then played it off as a triumph of skilled negotiation. And, as the election has shown, it worked. So my prediction is we will get the Brexit deal done. I won't like it, but I was never going to. None of us will ever read it, but the anti-Conservative keyboard miltia will hate it even if it's good, and the print media and Conservative sycophants will love it even if it's bad, so it's perfectly possible none of us will ever know the truth. Just like we will never see the report into whether or not there was Russian interference in the Brexit referendum.
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Re: Brexit

Postby Krashlia » Tue Jan 14, 2020 6:05 am

Thiiis is why I think some actual power needs to be re-invested in the Royal family. Not unlimited and unrestricted, but meaningful enough to be a wildcard, and probably a populist one since the overarching interests of the lower house and the Monarch are at odds.

Your Republic screwing it up?
I don't know, whenever times are tough, invoke the Monarch through a mass conjuring ritual, as a throw back to a time when a guy in weirdly expensive cloth did it instead, on the theory that sometimes crude weapons do the job better than the sophisticated tool.
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Re: Brexit

Postby cmsellers » Tue Jan 14, 2020 10:59 pm

That's one of those things that sounds tempting when you have a nice, no-nonsense grandmotherly lady like Elizabeth as queen. But remember, Queen Elizabeth is 93. The heir to the throne is Prince Charles, who is—and how do I say this nicely?—an elitist, bubble-dwelling, idiot.

And this is why monarchy is a bad idea. Johnson will be out eventually, and there's a good chance he's out in five years. If the Labour Party's rank and file hadn't stood by Corbyn, he might have been out even sooner. A King Charles with actual power is for life. Which is why, the first time it happened, England chopped off his head, and then fought a civil war to establish parliamentary supremacy in the hopes it would never happen again.
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Re: Brexit

Postby NathanLoiselle » Wed Jan 15, 2020 9:46 pm

So doddering old lady good. Prince Charles bad?
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Re: Brexit

Postby Marcuse » Wed Jan 22, 2020 1:23 am

It's been a while since the election so I've had some time to think, but man I'm still surprised.

I don't like the assertion that more people voted for Remain parties, because it involves people lumping Labour in as a Remain party when honestly I don't think that reflects their policy intentions. It would have been entirely likely with this electorate that a second referendum might have also ended up pro-Brexit and presumably Labour would have been committed to doing that. Or holding a third one. I dunno.

But that uncertainty seems to have been a catalyst for people. I think at base this was an election about certainty more than anything else. Boris is a shit and a coward but we know exactly what he intended to do in the simplest possible terms. While Labour was struggling to articulate it's complicated roadmap for Brexit, and the Lib Dems were struggling to explain their technical unilateral revoke policy that wasn't one really (because they would only unilaterally revoke if they got a majority and therefore a huge unprecedented mandate) Boris was shitting out the phrase Get Brexit Done like a broken jack-in-the-box. As the phrase goes, if you're explaining, you're losing.

With two major parties fucking around explaining shit, and the regional parties being regional, the only place to get certainty was with the Conservatives. I watched a Question Time from Hull and I was surprised to see so many Northerners being so aggressive and angry that they voted to Leave the first time around and it still hadn't happened. The Remain pundits really didn't have anything sensible to say about it, it was fundamental that the views of the people on the panel and the public were diametrically opposed and no words would alter that. That's why I think Labour lost so many traditional heartlands; they'd placed themselves in a position where no amount of wild investment promises would solve the Brexit issue.

So now we're stuck with another Conservative government for the next five years who will make as big a fuckup of Brexit as they will everything else they do. Wonderful. Labour have descended into months of wrangling over who will be the next leader, only to (I'm guessing) elect another white male Londoner who espouses a slightly more restrained socialism that also doesn't appeal to enough of the electorate.

I think we do need to seriously look at the electoral system, because right now nobody is benefitting from such a system where the SNP can get 50+ seats for little more than 2% of the vote but the lib dems get four times that and a quarter of the MPs. While the constituency system works for some things, like having an individual representative you can contact to help you, it's patently not fit for purpose in the modern world and the more I see it playing out in elections the more I think it's not helping politics.
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Re: Brexit

Postby Pedgerow » Wed Jan 22, 2020 11:09 pm

The Labour leadership battle does strike me as a more high-stakes battle than normal, because there are so many more voices and angles than there used to be, and so Labour now have a real tightrope to walk. And I am very concerned that Jess Phillips has pulled out of the race. I really thought the final two would be Keir Starmer and Jess Phillips, because Keir Starmer is the consummate politician, but Jess Phillips motivates people. If this leader didn't have to go on and win an election, I'd say Keir was the best man for the job because he's the best traditional politician. But the current environment hates traditional politicians. The electorate like Boris and Nigel Farage, people you'd go to the pub with. If the next election is a vote for who you'd rather be friends with, rather than whoever is best at politics, then Boris Johnson will trounce every Labour leadership candidate hands-down. The only Labour leadership candidate I'd go drinking with is the one who uses the phrase "absolute bantz" in her tweets while trolling the opposition. With Jess Phillips now out of the race, Labour are effectively gambling that the British people will be sick of "fun" politicians by 2025. I honestly don't think they will be, unless Boris really, really cocks everything up.

The latest Brexit news, meanwhile, is that the EU Withdrawal Bill sailed through the House of Commons, went straight up to the House of Lords, and was promptly defeated by quisling Remoaners and sent straight back down to the House of Commons to be amended with despicable anti-British treachery like promising to help child refugees. The Cult of BoJo refused to make any changes whatsoever and sent it straight back up. The Lords then passed it anyway, basically to avoid causing a scene. So that's pretty predictable, really, but damn, I hate these overwhelming parliamentary majorities that make the ruling party pretty much unaccountable.
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Re: Brexit

Postby gisambards » Thu Jan 23, 2020 3:20 am

I don't think it's really true that the public is solely interested in "fun" politicians. To me, putting policy issues aside, there are three clear reasons Johnson does seem to be personally popular, and which any challenger will need to emulate (and which I have very real concerns about Keir Starmer or Rebecca Long Bailey's ability to do so):

1) Engagement with the public. As much as people deride Johnson for being out-of-touch (which, to quite a large extent, he is) it can't be denied that he actually really gets stuck in interacting with the general public, including - as we saw quite a lot - members of the public who don't agree with him. I think that footage of Johnson letting that man in Leeds shout at him for several minutes actually did a lot to boost Johnson's credibility in many people's eyes. Whereas Jeremy Corbyn was noticeably bad at this - his campaign team put out lots of stuff of him meeting "regular people", but it was always people who agreed with him and were happy to see him, which beggared belief. Too early to say how well the Labour candidates will do with this - Jess Phillips probably would have been good at this aspect, I think any of the four remaining could go either way.

2) Engagement with the media. Obviously something Johnson was legitimately criticised for was his refusal to do a lot of interviews and debates, but the fact is when he is interviewed he does stick to his guns and sticks up for himself well. He comes across as himself, rather than a soulless entity reciting talking points (which is a key part of the final point), is engaging to listen to even if you disagree with everything he's saying, and usually gets the point he wants to get across across, even if the interviewer wants to focus on something else. Contrast to Corbyn - infamously boring speaker, frequently fell back on recitation of uninteresting talking points, would often try to weasel out of unwanted questions and just let them linger (ideally a politician should engage with the question properly, but if you aren't going to answer a question you need to do it in a way that distracts from the fact you're not answering the question). Closer to the election he did start getting snippy with journalists, but that's not really standing up for oneself, and in most of those cases the journalist had interrupted because he wasn't saying anything of interest. With the current Labour candidates, Lisa Nandy's very good at this and Emily Thornberry's usually good at this. The two front-runners, not so much.

3) Lastly, a concrete personal image. Johnson has a very tenuous relationship with the truth more generally, but something that is noteworthy is he is not particularly disingenuous about himself. Yes, he's out of touch, but he never pretends not to be - he instead actively plays up how much of a toff he is. And that is something the British public tends to respect, and where there tends to be a lack of respect for the opposite: Corbyn's attempt to come across as this kindly, ordinary bloke from a humble background failed to resonate with the majority, because it was just so clearly not who he actually was. Johnson's public persona is exaggerated, but it is rooted in who he actually is. In his case, or with Farage or Phillips, it translates into being someone you (or at least, someone who responds positively to their respective personalities) could want to spend time with, but I don't think it requires that. People often mouth off about corporate-seeming career politicians, but if one combines that image with a credible claim to competence people do actually respond to that pretty positively. Nicola Sturgeon does this well, David Cameron was doing it well at the time he won his majority, and I think actually a part of why Ed Miliband didn't do so well was because he couldn't convey that competent corporate feeling. This is something I think either Lisa Nandy or Keir Starmer, and probably Emily Thornberry, could manage if they've cleaned the party up by 2024.

All that said, I think personality is not actually Labour's biggest issue in the slightest. Labour needs to understand why it lost and adjust itself accordingly. The ideal candidate for this is absolutely Lisa Nandy, who is impressive, pragmatic, and has been demonstrably more in tune with the general public than most of the rest of Labour for a while now. I think Keir Starmer is probably intelligent enough to put Labour back where it needs to be by the next election, but really if they were looking at this rationally Nandy is the clear choice.
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Re: Brexit

Postby Pedgerow » Thu Jul 30, 2020 12:34 am

Remember last year, when there was an investigation into Russian interference in British democracy? It's okay if you've forgotten it; coronavirus has utterly superseded the comparatively delightful scene of clown-world politics in the 2010s. There was talk that Russia might have deliberately agitated in favour of Brexit, because sometimes all you need is instability among your rivals to come out on top, and then the Russia report was mysteriously suppressed until after the election, almost like the government was hiding something. Well, the report is out now!

And it's really underwhelming. I'll admit that I don't even really understand it. The guy leading the investigation, Stewart Hosie, pretty much says the investigation was a total waste of time. Wouldn't that be Stewart Hosie's fault if so? Anyway, his conclusions, from the investigation that never happened, are that it's blindingly obvious that Russia has interfered in plenty of the past decade's elections and referendums (referenda?), but also that nobody has really looked into it. That was his job! That's why I'm confused! The Russians almost definitely tried to influence the Scottish independence referendum in 2014, but the status quo won that one so I guess they failed. When it comes to Brexit, however:

Had the relevant parts of the intelligence community conducted a similar threat assessment prior to the [EU] referendum, it is inconceivable that they would not have reached the same conclusion as to Russian intent, which might then have led them to take action to protect the process.


and, more damningly,

Mr Hosie also said no-one in Government wanted to touch the issue of Russian interference when it came to elections with a "10-foot pole".

He told reporters: "The report reveals that no one in government knew if Russia interfered in or sought to influence the referendum, because they did not want to know.

"The UK government have actively avoided looking for evidence that Russia interfere."


So I guess the ultimate lesson is that the Russians were absolutely doing everything in their power to turn us all against each other, and they succeeded so well that nobody wanted to lose votes by pointing this out. And it worked, too. This report was a moderate news story for about six hours, a little over a week ago, and that was that. I guess Donald Trump was right about voter disenfranchisement and so on: electoral fraud really is incredibly, insultingly easy, and absolutely nobody cares about stopping it. So while I might jokingly refer to the past decade as "clown-world politics", Donald Trump was right about something in 2020, and you don't get much more clown-world than that. Maybe I was the clown this whole time.
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Re: Brexit

Postby NathanLoiselle » Thu Jul 30, 2020 10:39 am

Doesn't Brexit sound a little like Brunch? No? Only me?
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Re: Brexit

Postby Marcuse » Sat Aug 01, 2020 5:14 pm

@Pedgerow

The upshot of why you're confused is that the intelligence committee isn't in charge of investigating, it's in charge of oversight over the government. A good comparison would be that the public accounts committee holds the government to account for its spending, but doesn't control or direct such spending. Committees are made up of multiple parties (though members are usually appointed by the government so they seem to end up packed with governing party members, even if some opposition spaces seem to be guaranteed) and ask the kind of questions like "why did this massive project fail at a huge loss" etc. Stewart Hosie is actually an SNP MP, and I believe the only one on the committee at the moment. He's definitely not part of the Westminster government.

As a side note, the intelligence committee was recently made independent of government, but then Boris attempted to pack the committee with his own MPs, and whip them to back Chris Grayling (ex-transport sec) as leader. In actual fact a different Tory ended up selected by both Tory members and the Labour and SNP ones, and he was promptly expelled from the Conservative party. No foul play there.

The publication of this report, delivered by an SNP member, can then be seen as a direct result of the government making a bumbling attempt to suppress the report by installing a loyalist in a supposedly "independent" committee. Presumably they could then say with some degree of honesty that at no point had we found evidence of Russian interference in elections, while conveniently omitting the subsidiary fact that they completely neglected to actually carry out such an investigation.

In the event, we have probably gotten an answer much closer to the truth; that government was exceptionally complacent in the face of a mounting and imminent threat from Russian interference in our politics and they simply failed entirely to take such a threat seriously. I suspect this is largely to do with the amount Russian oligarchs involve themselves with London property, UK politicians, and UK businesses. All that money coming in is probably too much for an austerity party to miss out on, and if we have to politely tolerate some off colour business practices, interference and the occasional dissident assassination, I'm sure the conservatives (and some of Labour frankly) are more than willing to look the other way.

It's of course extremely convenient at the moment that our ruling party generally agrees with the same priorities that Putin has: destabilising Europe, isolating countries with narrow nationalism and entrenching Russian economic involvement in financial, media and property fields making their extirpation nigh impossible.
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Re: Brexit

Postby Pedgerow » Sat Aug 01, 2020 11:19 pm

Thank you very much! That makes sense. And also, you've drawn attention to something else I was wondering about.

Marcuse wrote:I'm sure the conservatives (and some of Labour frankly) are more than willing to look the other way.


Jeremy Corbyn was meant to be the friend of Russia, the RT operative trying to infiltrate our political system. So does this mean Russia wanted us all to vote for him? Or did they want us to vote Conservative, in favour of Brexit but against their alleged pal? If Russia has been campaigning for both Scottish independence and the Labour Party... they're not very good at this, are they? They currently have a 1/3 success rate. Or maybe that's just what they want us to think.
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