Brexit is official: Article 50 is invoked.
POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Sunday, July 12, 2026 14:06
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Free interwebs for everyone? 'Nationalising Broadband is a Distraction From Brexit'
https://www.bitchute.com/video/ZvjfXM4Db1I/
snooty and smug online personality former Ukip candidate Carl Benjamin
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Labour has been waging a culture war against its own base for decades, fixating on liberalism instead - George Galloway
Not since the election of 1935 has the Parliamentary Labour Party been so small. When political dinosaurs roamed the earth a split Labour Party collapsed to the challenge of the Great Depression and seemed bound for extinction.
Ten years later they had their biggest ever election win sweeping Mr Churchill the War Leader from office.
My point is not merely to put in scale what happened in the British general election but also to illustrate the famous truth that there is no "final victory," and no "final defeat" either. It's never over.
I consistently predicted, on RT and everywhere, that Labour seats would go down like dominoes, that Labour would lose dozens - maybe scores - of seats throughout the Midlands, the north-west and north-east of England, and in Wales. All my expectations came to pass as counting continued into a real-life Friday the 13th for Labour.
It was Brexit of course – only the foolhardy deny their own electorate on such a matter, and so brazenly and for so long – but not only Brexit. In former premier Harold MacMillan's words "it's never one damned thing, it's one damned thing after another."
Labour's defiance of its own supporters behind its 'red-wall' – seats in some cases it had held for a hundred years, seemed to put the tin-hat on things for the British industrial and post industrial heartlands. For American readers, imagine Michigan, Connecticut and Pennsylvania.
And that's after many years of amused bemused tolerance of an increasingly metropolitan liberal Labour Party – which regularly parachuted in such liberals in Labour livery into what were until now safe Labour seats. So, for example, that well known coal-miner Tony Blair dropped in for a while as the MP for the mining town of Sedgefield with his fancy London Barrister ways…
Because these kinds of faces of Labour had no connection to industry itself – they probably thought Swarfega was a Balearic island – they saw their task as not to rage against the dying of the mining and manufacturing light, but to persuade their people to go quietly into that good night. Close the pit, open a heritage park, shut the factory, put up a shopping mall in its stead. Where once were 40-hour blue collar union jobs with decent pay the gig-economy would have to suffice. It's "flexible," don't you know…
Labour's descent into the snake-pit of identity politics began a long time ago. I should know, I was there. Under the influence of the 'Euro-Communists', an ideological breakaway from Moscow in the 1980s, it was imagined that the working class – and thus its class interests – had withered away, and that new "communities" (many of them imagined) would have to be the building blocks for Labour political power.
It's rather as if someone persuaded you that there was something called a "football community" which could be dealt with collectively. But members of the football community – people like myself who are football crazy – have nothing in common with each other. In fact as fans of rival teams, we oftentimes hate each other. Political "offers" to such an imagined community can therefore often exacerbate divisions as well as angering those who think football is 22 fools running around chasing a pig's bladder.
Transpose this, thus: If you are a white, heterosexual, married man or woman with kids, seeing your supposed party endlessly fixating about race, gender, sexual politics and the wonders of liberalism, the EU and all that jazz-hands might well begin to make you feel, well, left out.
If you are a lady of a certain age, you might feel a bit left out at your party worshiping at the altar of youth, a 'Youthquake' may for you be a distant memory. When your party picks as its plum-policy free, nationalised broadband, you maNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Credit where credit is due: Nigel Farage helped craft the Conservative win.
I have to say that Farage is an extremely intelligent and focused person who keeps his eyes on the prize (Brexit) and not on his party. The decision to pull candidates from so many Conservative-dominated districts must have been a very difficult one and earned him a lot of criticism from within his own party, but was ultimately the best course of action in terms of aiming towards Brexit.
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The Brexit party folded, but make no mistake: Farage won it for Johnson
Darren Loucaides
Whatever Nigel Farage does next, his decision to stand aside against 317 Tories and target Labour leavers was monumental
Last modified on Fri 13 Dec 2019 10.10 EST
Until 11 November, many had assumed that Nigel Farage’s Brexit party was revving up for a general election. But that morning, Farage told an audience of supporters and journalists in Hartlepool that his Brexit party would be standing down in 317 Conservative-held seats to avoid splitting the leave vote. The audience was stunned; there was muted applause after he finished.
This election will be remembered as a resounding, crushing victory for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives. Just as has happened countless times before, Farage will be written off and ridiculed for his party not winning a single seat. But that morning of 11 November was the single most important moment of the campaign. Farage won it for Johnson.
The decision to stand down against the Tories was not an easy one. According to Ed Jankowski, who was the Brexit party’s digital strategist until the middle of November before resigning, Farage was for a long time eager to stand in every seat and not stand down – as he was being pressured to do by his erstwhile Leave.EU ally Arron Banks. Farage instead kept pushing a leave alliance that the Tories were never likely to officially agree to. But as the Brexit party started to flag in the polls, Farage lost his nerve and gave in to those not wanting to challenge Conservative seats.
In Farage’s speech, and in the weeks following, he pledged to scoop up the leave vote in Labour heartlands and places people were unlikely to ever vote Tory. As for Jankowski, he told me that he pushed hard to get a detailed data set of Labour leavers. If he had stayed on, Jankowski says he would have pushed for the Brexit party to hone its digital content so that it made a strong emotional appeal to those voters.
Instead of the sophisticated digital campaign Jankowski envisaged, the wheels seemed to come off the Brexit party campaign. Farage’s close ally Alexandra Phillips, who used to be his head of media at Ukip, publicly criticised the decision to stand down, saying she felt “disenfranchised” for not being able to vote Brexit party in her own Conservative-held constituency. Farage and the party chairman, Richard Tice, are also rumoured to have fallen out over strategy, with Farage no longer showing up in the seat Tice stood in Hartlepool.
Farage spent the rest of the campaign travelling predominantly to Labour leave seats, albeit to greatly diminished crowds compared to the big rallies seen earlier in the year. But while the shine had gone from the Brexit party, and it ended up winning no seats, its campaign has had a major impact on the election.
One of the early results of the election night, a Labour hold in Sunderland Central by 2,964 votes, was striking for the swing. Labour was down 13.4%, Conservatives up slightly by 2%, while the Brexit party had a swing of 11.6% from a standing start. When the first 10 seats were in, in mostly northern and Midlands seats, there was nearly a 10% drop for Labour, while the Conservatives were only up 2.1% and the Brexit party was scooping up a 6% swing.
In some places the Conservatives gained seats from Labour on modest swings, while the Brexit party got swings of more than 10%. In Don Valley, Caroline Flint’s 2017 majority of 5,169 appears to have been swallowed up by the Brexit party – which won 6,247 votes as the Tories took the seat. A simNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Also, both this and the Hong Kong election show the problem of a "first past the post" system. Imagine that there is a nation with an electorate evenly divided 49.9% to 50.1% in every district. It would be possible for the majority party to win 100% of the seats even tho they represent only 50.1% of the people.
Germany gets around this (in the Bundestag) with a proportional system: each district is assigned a number of representatives (population-based) and everyone gets to vote for a candidate and ALSO for a party. Representatives are assigned to the Bundestag based on their percentage of the overall vote, so that the Green Party (for example) would get approximately 25% of representatives in the Bundestag if they get about 25% of the popular vote. It seems to me that this would work for the House, which (technically) represents the voters, as opposed to the Senate which (technically) represents the states. (BTW, the German legislature also has an "upper house" called the Bundesrat, which is an even more complictated representation).
HOWEVER, I would still like to think about DIRECT DEMOCRACY, for example, decision by referenda (such as the Brexit referendum, which the primarily pro-EU MPs did their best to subvert, no matter what their electorate said).
What about a referendum for the budget? Wouldn't it be empowering to be able to decide how much money should go to the military and the security agencies versus how much money should go to other discretionary activities?
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
I'd nuke a BILLION PEOPLE if it would save the other 7 billion from living under Putin. Hell, I might go all the way to the last 100 people on Earth to keep this planet from being under fascist rule.- WISHIMAY
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I'm still mulling over how that all went down - not just splitting the vote but splitting it with malice aforethought*, as a former co-worker used to say. And I'm trying to imagine how such a tactic might be used by a third party here.
But Farage - brilliant! Well done!
* Maybe not malice, but certainly an intentional tactic to achieve a desired goal. I know a lot of criticism has been lobbed at third party candidates in the US who accidentally 'cost' someone an election - Nader and Perot being the spoilers I can think of, but the TDSers sometimes claim the Green Party (or whoever) 'cost' Clinton the election as well.
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When it comes to referenda -
We in the US have an issue, and I think it comes down to us not having a parliamentary/Prime Minister system. In that system the representatives (ie Parliament) and the executive (ie the PM) are fused into one functioning unit. And generally each party is strongly associated with a particular platform. For example pro- or anti-Brexit. So when there's a referendum, one would assume that the party that's for that referendum would be voted in, and would then carry it out in the Parliament/PM system. So to some extent the referendum has a good chance of being synced up with the Parliament/executive functions.
Here, there'd be the referendum, the parties, the executive branch and the legislative branch. What would happen if the vote was split between parties (Congress/Executive, or one house of Congress/Executive) and the referendum? Or Congress+Executive v referendum? Who would be tasked with carrying it out? Especially if the party most strongly associated as anti-the-referendum has significant blocking power between the Legislative/Executive branches?
I think we'd need a major restructuring, or some rule that holds all parties to executing a referendum even if it's against their party principles/platform especially when they hold significant power to stop it.
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Quote:Interesting point. But Brexit is an example of a Parliamentarian system that ignored it's referendum (Theresa May, bolloxing the negotiations with the EU for three years; MPs ignoring their constituencies) while CA is a USA-style legislative system that routinely implements the results of referenda. Come to think of it, I'm not sure how the CA system works, other than the state Legislature drafts a law based on the results of the referenda. Maybe the politicians are so afraid of the voters that they don't stray too far from the referenda? I'll have to look that up!
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
When it comes to referenda -
We in the US have an issue, and I think it comes down to us not having a parliamentary/Prime Minister system. In that system the representatives (ie Parliament) and the executive (ie the PM) are fused into one functioning unit. And generally each party is strongly associated with a particular platform. For example pro- or anti-Brexit. So when there's a referendum, one would assume that the party that's for that referendum would be voted in, and would then carry it out in the Parliament/PM system. So to some extent the referendum has a good chance of being synced up with the Parliament/executive functions.
Here, there'd be the referendum, the parties, the executive branch and the legislative branch. What would happen if the vote was split between parties (Congress/Executive, or one house of Congress/Executive) and the referendum? Or Congress+Executive v referendum? Who would be tasked with carrying it out? Especially if the party most strongly associated as anti-the-referendum has significant blocking power between the Legislative/Executive branches?
I think we'd need a major restructuring, or some rule that holds all parties to executing a referendum even if it's against their party principles/platform especially when they hold significant power to stop it.
I know that CA is pointed to as a system that has gone referenda-crazy, with the many referenda on the ballot each year leading to poorly thought-out legislation. But I think this is just democracy at work, which could be improved on if the media did a better job of informing the public of the anticipated benefits and downsides, and the actual successes and failures of referenda.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
I'd nuke a BILLION PEOPLE if it would save the other 7 billion from living under Putin. Hell, I might go all the way to the last 100 people on Earth to keep this planet from being under fascist rule.- WISHIMAY
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Is Boris Johnson a Brilliant Political Strategist?
Maybe so. But Johnson did this by giving the hard right exactly what it wanted: Brexit, and no shilly-shallying about it. As for anti-immigration fever calming, few people ever seem to take a good look at the timing of all this. The Brexit referendum, unfortunately, was held very shortly after the peak of the European refugee crisis, when panic about it was still fresh:
The graph is here and will give you great insight:
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/12/is-boris-johnson-a-brilliant-po
litical-strategist/
It’s pretty easy to calm anti-immigrant fever if you simply wait a few years for the fever to break naturally. And it’s pretty easy to defang a political movement if you basically surrender to all their demands, no? If you want to argue that this was the only way to get things done, and Johnson was the only one to see it, fine. But there’s not a lot of political brilliance here.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:I thought Canada has a parliamentary system ... ? Both Britain and Canada have regularly scheduled elections but there are other ways to invoke elections for cause (or for political reasons, like dissolving Parliament and calling for early elections when you're in a popularity 'up' cycle.)
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Interesting point. But Brexit is an example of a Parliamentarian system that ignored it's referendum (Theresa May, bolloxing the negotiations with the EU for three years; MPs ignoring their constituencies) while CA is a USA-style legislative system that routinely implements the results of referenda. Come to think of it, I'm not sure how the CA system works, other than the state Legislature drafts a law based on the results of the referenda. Maybe the politicians are so afraid of the voters that they don't stray too far from the referenda? I'll have to look that up!
I know that CA is pointed to as a system that has gone referenda-crazy, with the many referenda on the ballot each year leading to poorly thought-out legislation. But I think this is just democracy at work, which could be improved on if the media did a better job of informing the public of the anticipated benefits and downsides, and the actual successes and failures of referenda.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
I'd nuke a BILLION PEOPLE if it would save the other 7 billion from living under Putin. Hell, I might go all the way to the last 100 people on Earth to keep this planet from being under fascist rule.- WISHIMAY
As for poorly written legislation - maybe the best test-case for referenda is the California system, where I see that the problem is big-money interests who have a lot to say ... over and over ... about ballot propositions and can drive votes.
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Meanwhile ...
looks like Britain is having its own derangement syndrome brewing ...
"F**k Boris" - Antifa Protesters Clash With Police Outside Downing Street As Furious Leftists Revolt
Left-Wing Newspaper Advises People "How To Leave The United Kingdom" After Election Loss
'Not My Prime Minister' - Radical Left Marches Against Democracy In Britain
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