If Music Could Talk

Dr. Medulla wrote: ↑

19 Dec 2018, 3:28pm

Silent Majority wrote: ↑

19 Dec 2018, 3:12pm

Like Trump, Leave didn't expect to win so no prep was done at all.

It was also more of tantrum than a considered policy shift. Canada's gone thru two referenda where Quebec has each time narrowly voted to stay in confederation. What makes me roll my eyes about that is that it's more romance than realist. When asked during the second referendum, back in the 90s, about economic hardships and the like from the break-up, one of the French sovereignist leaders likened independence to a magic wand that would be a reset and wipe away all the problems. That's either painfully naive or cynically conning the painfully naive. I always compare that to the Southern secessionists in 1860 and 1861. They were under no illusions that everything was go to be rainbows and unicorns; secession meant hard times ahead, but it something that had to be done. They were a bunch of vicious white supremacists, but I will give them more clarity than the either Quebec nationalists or the Brexit crowd. If you don't own up to how devastating these kinds of moves will be for perhaps decades, you're a dope or a conman.

Marky Dread wrote: ↑

19 Dec 2018, 3:53pm

It all amounts to people being blindsided by politics that deal with the now and shows little if any forsight for future generations. Yet another one of Maggie's legacies.

Dr. Medulla wrote: ↑

19 Dec 2018, 4:09pm

Marky Dread wrote: ↑

19 Dec 2018, 3:53pm

It all amounts to people being blindsided by politics that deal with the now and shows little if any forsight for future generations. Yet another one of Maggie's legacies.

Or it might be one of the effects of us buying into consumer culture back in the 50s (or thereabouts), where immediate gratification is the non-negotiable norm and worrying about the cost later (if at all). The idea of consequences that demand modifying our behaviour, to even deny what we want, has become intolerable and therefore fuel for faux populists.

Marky Dread wrote: ↑

19 Dec 2018, 4:42pm

I brought up Maggie because there are many parallels with May. The way Maggie conned the voters in 80s with the sale of council homes they and future generations will require. Now they are private owned homes and people like Silent Majority for example having to move from London to Birmingham to find a rent that will not cripple him and his good lady financially.

Dr. Medulla wrote: ↑

19 Dec 2018, 4:50pm

Marky Dread wrote: ↑

19 Dec 2018, 4:42pm

I brought up Maggie because there are many parallels with May. The way Maggie conned the voters in 80s with the sale of council homes they and future generations will require. Now they are private owned homes and people like Silent Majority for example having to move from London to Birmingham to find a rent that will not cripple him and his good lady financially.

I know I've mentioned it before, but there's a good novel about that by Tim Lott called Rumours of a Hurricane, about a working class family who get caught up in that Thatcherite privatization dream—you can have it all!—and are, predictably, destroyed by the reality.

Marky Dread wrote: ↑

19 Dec 2018, 5:26pm

Dr. Medulla wrote: ↑

19 Dec 2018, 4:50pm

Marky Dread wrote: ↑

19 Dec 2018, 4:42pm

I brought up Maggie because there are many parallels with May. The way Maggie conned the voters in 80s with the sale of council homes they and future generations will require. Now they are private owned homes and people like Silent Majority for example having to move from London to Birmingham to find a rent that will not cripple him and his good lady financially.

I know I've mentioned it before, but there's a good novel about that by Tim Lott called Rumours of a Hurricane, about a working class family who get caught up in that Thatcherite privatization dream—you can have it all!—and are, predictably, destroyed by the reality.

Think I may have to check that one out.

Dr. Medulla wrote: ↑

19 Dec 2018, 5:38pm

Marky Dread wrote: ↑

19 Dec 2018, 5:26pm

Dr. Medulla wrote: ↑

19 Dec 2018, 4:50pm

Marky Dread wrote: ↑

19 Dec 2018, 4:42pm

I brought up Maggie because there are many parallels with May. The way Maggie conned the voters in 80s with the sale of council homes they and future generations will require. Now they are private owned homes and people like Silent Majority for example having to move from London to Birmingham to find a rent that will not cripple him and his good lady financially.

I know I've mentioned it before, but there's a good novel about that by Tim Lott called Rumours of a Hurricane, about a working class family who get caught up in that Thatcherite privatization dream—you can have it all!—and are, predictably, destroyed by the reality.

Think I may have to check that one out.

Check your pm's, goombah.

coffeepotman wrote: ↑

16 Jan 2019, 8:27am

Can someone from across the pond please enlighten me, this is all confusing. Will the UK leave the EU or not, the news reports here, what little I've seen are vague. Does this mean that they will not leave?

coffeepotman wrote: ↑

16 Jan 2019, 9:18am

Thanks Marky, American politics are ugly enough for me, I have difficulty understanding how the UK parliamentary system works, you can just call an election at anytime. I tend not to trust any public referendums, if we ruled by that slavery would probably be still legal in Amerikkka

Marky Dread wrote: ↑

16 Jan 2019, 10:13am

US
I'm stunned that the president has the power to shut everything down. Forcing people who are trying to feed their families to have no job/income.

In 1956, the then chancellor of the exchequer Harold Macmillan commissioned his officials to suggest the best way for Britain to integrate itself into the rapidly growing western European economy. Their plan, soon adopted as official policy, was that Britain and the emerging European Community would both join a new free trade area for industrial goods. In this perfect world, Britain would not be in the EC, would not have to pool any of its sovereignty with the other European powers, would maintain its preferential trade with the Commonwealth, would enjoy frictionless trade with Europe but would still be free to do whatever deals it wanted with the rest of the world. It could, in other words, have its cake and eat it. And why would the other Europeans agree to this? Because, as the Board of Trade explained: “The possibility of UK cooperation would be so welcome [to the Europeans] that we should be able to enter the plan more or less on our own terms.”

If this sounds familiar even to those of us who are not historians of British economic policy in the 1950s, it’s because it is the vision for Brexit that was advertised 60 years later. Plan G, as it was known in 1956, is now Plan A for the true believers: we can have all the benefits of being in the EU without the burdens and compromises of actual membership. And the other Europeans will be so glad that we have condescended to deal with them that we can dictate our own terms.

It didn’t work in 1956, not least because, as Kevin O’Rourke states in his crisp, clear and quietly devastating history, “UK policymakers had been focused on what was required in order to achieve a domestic consensus in Britain. Not surprisingly, they had produced a blueprint that was indeed a very good deal for Britain – but in so doing they had paid insufficient attention to other countries’ interests.” And of course it has not worked since 2016 for precisely the same reasons. Here, as in so much else, we see that if Brexit has a history, it is not a linear one – it loops back not just to an imagined past but to assumptions about Britain’s place in the world that were untenable even in the 1950s.

Dr. Medulla wrote: ↑

16 Jan 2019, 10:29am

This is only partially true. Right now, if the House and Senate passed a spending bill to restore funding to all these departments that are shut down without the wall nonsense, Trump would veto it. However, the bill would then go back to both the House and Senate and if they re-pass the bill with two-thirds majorities, it overrides his veto. So it's not just Trump but the Republicans in the Senate that won't defy him and pass a veto-proof spending bill. Trump's the big problem, but he has some essential handmaidens. The absurdity is that the system is set up that this kind of situation is able to exist.