Sovereignty, Schmovereignty.

Been doing some thinking, being the scurrilous, Remain traitor that I am:

1. The turnout for the 2014 European Elections was 37.44% - a pitiful turnout and the lowest in Europe, indicating that Europe was a non-issue at the time; it doesn't, after all, affect us on a daily basis. Ukip managed to get 4.3766m votes. That was only 9.46% of the total electorate, although still the largest representation - perhaps because of the apathy of the average voter, so not exactly a ringing endorsement of Leave. It does show, however, that extremists can take advantage of voter apathy.
2. In the Referendum, Leave managed to poll 17.4017m votes, 37.44% of the total electorate and 52% of the votes cast.

Now, if the Brexiteers are currently to be believed, their main issue in the Referendum was national sovereignty - despite the British Social Attitudes Survey in 2017 showing nearly three-quarters (73 per cent) of those who were worried about immigration voted Leave, compared with 36 per cent of those who did not identify this as a concern. Sovereignty came a poor second or 3rd. 

If national sovereignty was indeed their main issue, then why was this not a issue in the 2014 European Elections? While Labour and Conservative MEPs stood on reform of the EU, they were certainly not advocating leaving; Ukip alone had that as central to their manifesto. So, in 2 years, national sovereignty went from being the preoccupation of 9.46% of the electorate to 37.44%. What happened?

My question to Brexiteers is, if you didn't vote Ukip and wanted out of the EU in 2014, why did you suddenly vote for Leave in 2016? I wouldn't seriously expect to get an honest answer, but a  lot of people (not all) are telling porkies if they maintain sovereignty has always been their prime concern. I would conclude that immigration remains their prime concern (as indicated in the Social Attitudes Survey) and sovereignty has become a convenient hook on which to disguise that for fear of being labelled as xenophobic or racist. All you hear now from the Brexit Elite is sovereignty, sovereignty and more sovereignty. Given the extent to which the Brexit Elite lies have been debunked, it's their only liferaft, albeit a tenuous one.

Here are the Leave word cloud compared to the Remain word cloud, compiled by the British Election Study, based on frequently used words in polls:

I think you can guess which is which without a pointer from me.

The first word cloud shows very clearly that a key concern for Leave voters was immigration. The issue dominates the leave voter word cloud and other words like ‘borders’ also feature. Other words that feature prominently concern issues surrounding sovereignty, including the word ‘sovereignty’ itself and ‘control’, and ‘laws’. Any suggestion that immigration was not at the heart of this vote runs counter to what researchers found.

There was another factor in the mix - austerity. This was a good chance for non-Conservatives to kick the government in the teeth; however, given Conservatives couldn't really do that, they elected to blame the EU for a whole load of domestic problems, cheered on by the Brexit Elite - the very architects of austerity and the bastards wanting the prying eyes of the EU kept away from their tax havens.

There was, of course, Cameron's desire to get concessions from the EU prior to the Referendum, but when all is said and done, he got the vast majority of the guarantees he wanted, so that can not, despite denialist claims to the contrary, have been a contributing factor, except for the terminally gullible. On the issue of immigration, the problem was instigated by the UK not implementing rules that were already available to them at the time of accession of the new members, so a self-inflicted injury having bugger all to do with the EU - the EU actually granted Cameron an extension to the immigration rules. There's nothing, however, quite like a scapegoat.

The irony is that if you want sovereignty then, adopting the Brexiteer’s definition of democracy, Parliament is quite entitled to ignore the 2016 vote altogether, as Parliament is sovereign.

Chas & Dave as Dinner Guests

Overheard in the car:

Chairman: "What's your critique of Goethe's phenomenology?"

Hay: "Who?"

Chairman: "Goethe."

Hay: "Wasn't that a Chas and Dave song?"

Hay and I have reached the conclusion that we need to cultivate a circle of young friends with kids. They're the perfect dinner guests, as they don't drink a lot, don't have much to argue about, are rather vague about politics and leave early because of the kids.

Old lushes like us are simply a pain in the arse; we drink a lot, argue about every bloody thing under the sun and overstay our welcome due to our freedom and rarely leaving till the small hours.

Etherial

Hay went to do her ecology volunteering thing yesterday, with me in tow. It was near the village of Slad in the Cotswolds, Laurie Lee country, and entails taking photographs of target areas to see how they evolve over the seasons and years.

Nice tree trunk.

The force of the wild garlic is strong within me. Hay collected a sackful to use as a pesto.

Primeval horsetail ferns, or equisetum - touch them and they spew out clouds of spores.

A herd of deer, but I was rather too late to get a shot of them.

The Magic Word

I was in a local charity shop yesterday looking for bargains. Over the other side of the (small) shop were child, mum and granny. The child was obviously wanting some toy; Granny said; "What's the magic word?....... What's the magic word?...... Come on, give me the magic word."

The child reluctantly said; "Please."

Granny responded; "No!"

I laughed like a drain. Granny said she didn't mean it, but couldn't resist....

Poetry & Lies

I was watching a John Redwood interview on Channel 4 where he maintained that, according to a recent ComRes poll, the majority of the UK now believed No Deal was the best option. Krishnan Guru-Murthy took him to task on this lie and eventually had to cut the interview short.

I also saw this lie repeated on a Leave Means Leave Facebook site yesterday - it was a paid advert - maintaining 63% of the public supports No Deal. As there was no link to the ComRes poll, nor the data, and being the traitorous sceptic that I am, I did some digging (I do a lot of digging). In no way does the ComRes site preamble come to this conclusion, nor does the raw data show any figure of 63% for the total cohort (63% appears 18 times in total), although it does for subsets of the cohort, such as Conservatives. I defy anyone to prove the data shows what Leave Means Leave or Redwood say it does.

Once more the Brexit Elite resort to blatant lies and, sadder still, the saps will lap it up, believe it and repeat it in their Brexit bubbles, lathering themselves up into a froth of indignant outrage. I am equally outraged - outraged that lying demagogues are given the air of publicity. In their desperation, the disaster capitalists are telling bigger and bigger lies and it will come back, as it's already doing, to bite them in the bum. Scum!

By the way, were Suffragettes and Abolitionists traitors too?

Military Coup

I was talking to some people about the recent furore over British soldiers using an image of Jeremy Corbyn for target practice and they (being antipodean) were rather nonplussed it had caused such a stir, being unaware of the regulations against service personnel engaging in political stunts.

The Queen's Regulations for the Army (1975) para J5.581 states: Regular personnel are not to take any active part in the affairs of any political organisation, party, or movement.

Service personnel are not precluded from membership or involvement in a political party, but such involvement must be in the individual's own time, not use any MoD resources and not involve the MoD being linked, in any way, with that party. You also cannot allow the party to use the fact that you are serving to support their agenda in any way. Nor, in general, can you canvass for your political party within your workplace. All pretty standard and logical stuff and the state of affairs in (I would say) most regular armies.

This led me to consider whether the military was predominantly right wing - authoritarianism generally going hand-in-glove with the right wing. I looked up whether there had ever been any left-wing military coup d'Etats, but they are few and far between (the Carnation Revolution in Portugal being a notable exception), thereby supporting my theory.

While searching for the relevant information I alighted on a YouGov poll from 2015 which showed that 44% of Ukip voters were supportive of a military coup under certain circumstances, including the abolition of the monarchy and disbandment of the military.

Worrying, but there again, Ukip has become less of a force and more of a Very Silly Party. It was, after all, nothing more than a convenient travelling companion for a while for some more right wing Conservatives.

Orwell on Nationalism

I found this passage from Orwell, which I thought interesting:

All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. . . . The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. . . . In nationalist thought there are facts which are both true and untrue, known and unknown. A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one’s own mind. . . . Every nationalist is haunted by the belief that the past can be altered. . . . Material facts are suppressed, dates altered, quotations removed from their context and doctored so as to change their meaning. Events which, it is felt, ought not to have happened are left unmentioned and ultimately denied. . . . Indifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing off of one part of the world from the other, which makes it harder and harder to discover what is actually happening. . .. If one harbours anywhere in one’s mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts although in a sense known to be true, are inadmissible.

 - George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism

Bugle Call for Dictators

My new book arrived on Monday. It's a must-have coffee table book and I'm scanning it for tips:

I think I'll go for the Josip Tito theme. Strangely, they generally tend to go for Ancien Régime glitter, but fake. Personal portraits are de rigueur.

Spotted this in a charity shop yesterday.

The last time I played a bugle I was aged 15. I then moved on to the Wellington drum and finally the base drum on parade on the last day of school when the base drummer was off sick. Brought back some wonderful memories of school. The mouthpiece, however, is very small and too close to the body of the instrument to get your mouth to it properly.

Denial of Blame Where Blame is Due

No matter what anyone may think, the root of the Brexit problem is David Cameron and the Conservative Party. Cameron decided to excise the hard right in his party and the drift to Ukip by holding a referendum. So supremely confident was he of winning it that he mistakenly decided to use a simple majority formula, rather than the supermajority used in the vast majority of cases where referendums are used to decide issues.

A simple majority will always leave the question undecided if the win is by a narrow margin, as it was in the EU referendum, whereas a supermajority is decisive and leaves no room for doubt or argument.

No wonder he scuttled off. He promised that the referendum result would be honoured, but he also promised he would stay on as PM to see it honoured.

A General Election is no solution to the problem - politics is as divided as the country, as we have seen, and would only lead to more uncertainty. How anyone would be surprised by this is astounding. The only logical solution is another referendum on the question of continued EU membership.

When all's said and done, we're currently in a Soft Remain - all the benefits with more opt-outs than a country with a lot of opt-outs. The promise of all the benefits with none of the cost was never a realistic option and totally undeliverable, as has been demonstrably proven. Those who believed it was were either extremely naive or gulled by false promises from demagogues.

The question now is whether another referendum should again be based on a simple majority, or a supermajority. In my opinion, it must be the same rules as the previous one, as that's what got us into this mess. With that's happened over the last 3 years, the information that's come to light, the prosecution of the Leave campaign organisers for fraud, the exposure of Brexit lies, a sense of pragmatism, the debacle of Northern Ireland, the indication of successive polls, the lack of a plan to implement the undeliverable and the current uncertainty, it's a foregone conclusion which way it would go, even if by a slim majority, and then we can all get on with living our lives and moaning about the weather.

I recommend readers to read this piece on a No Deal Brexit by Rory Stewart who, despite being Conservative, has a formidable intellect that I respect. He has an incisive ability to cut through the bullshit and see problems for what they are.

Asserting that a statement about factual reality is untrue is literal (total, complete, factual or flat) denial. Implicatory denial concedes the facts of the matter and even the conventional interpretations, but their expected implications, emotional or moral, are not recognised. The significance of the reality is denied. A lot of this is going on with the denigration of experts by Leavers.

Ideology, whether extreme left or right, has at its roots denialism and truth suffers as a result. It also introduces some pretty weird bedfellows in the attempt to build walls of denialist protection from uncomfortable facts. Witness the videos filling Brexiteer Facebook pages of AfD politicians. Influential members of AfD have openly espoused the shooting of illegal immigrants. While the AfD is not openly Nazi, it does share a lot its ideology with them - a strange ally for those in the UK who accuse the German government of acting like Nazis and constantly harping on about winning WWII - a severe case of cognitive dissonance and clutching at any available straw in order to avoid facing up to reality and facts.

Existentialist Coffee Table II

Job done, and no Dick Emery faux pas. That's because our tame builder, neighbour and friend, Colin, said he's do it for me with a handsaw, as a circular saw wouldn't keep a straight cut. He's the expert - but you know what we all think of experts now - well, some of us.

Hay and I are very pleased with the result. Exactly the right size for the purpose (or, rather, the right 2 sizes for the two purposes) and there's a definite point of contact between the extended and the unextended - Descartes would have been proud. I shall call it Descartes in his honour...