EU Elections

This Thursday, Britain will be voting in the EU elections, to send more than 70 members to represent our country in the European Parliament.

You might be forgiven for wondering why, as in 2016, we voted as a country to leave the EU. But because the government failed to agree on an exit strategy, we are stuck with the process of sending MEPs to the EU, despite the cost exceeding £110 million. To say this is completely unacceptable, is an understatement. It is nothing less than shameful, at a time when some British people are using Food Banks to survive, and the minimum wage here is insufficient to live on.

For only the second time in my life, I will not be voting. Because failing to vote is the only protest I can make, regarding this disrespect of Democracy, and the overturning of the accepted voting processes in this country.

The only word in my head is ‘SHAME’. Shame on Parliament for disrespecting the vote of the majority. Shame on Theresa May, for sucking up to the EU bigwigs. And shame on the Remain dissidents, who have tried to overturn the democratic process since 2016.

This country is now broken, and bitterly divided. And it is all the fault of those who refused to accept a result they didn’t expect. You are no better than fundamentalists, refusing to accept any idea or belief that you don’t adhere to.

Shame on you all. I am disgusted to live in the same country as you.

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Extending The Extension

I have just seen on the midday news that Mrs May has asked to extend the process of leaving the EU until the end of June.

If this is accepted, it will mean that we will have to participate in the forthcoming elections to the European Parliament.
Yes, we will have to spend countless millions organising a huge election to send representatives to an organisation we have already voted to leave.

This is not only lunacy piled on top of nonsense, but financially irresponsible too. There is now no doubt that British politics is broken beyond repair, and it is clear that the so-called ‘voice of the majority’ is only listened to when it makes the decisions that suit those in power.

I honestly never thought I would live to see the day when such blatant betrayal of the process was displayed with no regard for the voters.

Too Young In 2016

I have just been torturing myself by watching a televised debate on the issue of Brexit. Despite being worn out by the sheer scale of this betrayal of democracy, I continue to consume so much information about it, like an addict looking for the next fix.

One issue that kept being raised was that people who were too young to vote in 2016 would have voted to Remain. So now they are old enough to vote, they want a second referendum, so that they can be ‘included’. This nonsense was enough to make me want to smash my head through the living room window, and saw it off on the broken shards. So now we are expected to wait until everyone is 18, before we hold any type of election that they might not agree with once they reach that age? What an imbecilic argument. They of course omitted to mention that many young people over the age of 18 who were eligible to vote in 2016 just didn’t bother to get out of bed, or off the sofa, to do just that. But now they don’t like the result, they want another go.

Does it even occur to them that as they are voting, thousands of under 18s are still not eligible? What of their disappointment and disgust in three years time? Another election, so they too can be included?

In 1959, I was too young to vote against the Conservatives that won. Can I have a re-run of that election please?
I know, that’s a stupid thing to say.

Now do you get it, ‘concerned youngsters’?

Showing Their True Colours

The big news this week is about defectors. Not the sort of defectors who go and live in a foreign country, but political defectors in our own parliament.

It started with a group of disgruntled Labour Party members of parliament. They resigned from the Labour Party in a public fashion, calling a press conference to announce their reasons. Some said it was about Antisemitism. That is just the usual charge against the party, for not having a sympathetic stance on the state of Israel. Rather than address the human rights record of Israel, provide answers to what they are doing to other ethnic groups in their own country, or how Israel is moving further to the Far Right, they use the hackneyed accusation of Antisemitism, a catch-all that sounds great in a soundbite. But we all know it isn’t about religion and culture. It is simply about the actions of a religiously-dominated country imposing its will on those who do not share the same religion.

Some of those defectors showed more honesty. They were leaving because of Brexit. They had voted to Remain, and they lost. They want the Labour Party to promise a second referendum, and the leaders refuse to do so. So rather than work from within, promoting their own agenda, they chose to resign, and to sit in parliament as Independents. But they are not Independents in the real sense, as they rode in on the back of the organisation they now claim to revile. They are a small band of Centrist politicians who have never been Socialists, and never really espoused the true origins of the working-class Labour movement. They are the kind of people who want to just tell the voters what is best for them, and then hope that they just go away and do what they are told. We were soon hearing about this new ‘movement’, middle-ground politics, neither one thing nor the other. They complained that Labour had been taken over by left-wing extremists. In other words, their party members were now actually Socialists, as they should have been all along.

Soon after, those eight Labour politicians were joined by three members of the Conservative Party. They are also people who voted to Remain, in the EU referendum. They also want a second referendum, in the hope of changing the result. They were honest with their reasons. They don’t like the way Mrs May is continuing to insist on a departure from Europe, and they are unhappy with their colleagues on the Right of the party, who are urging a no-deal Brexit. They want to offer the public a new political alternative, a Centrist utopia, where they tell us what is good for us, and we quietly go away. They have happily joined this new group started by the Labour Party defectors, and I suspect it will have a new name soon. Something like Social Democrats, perhaps?

This is music to the ears of Vince Cable, and his pathetic Liberal Democrat Party. He has rushed to embrace the turncoats, and offered to work with them at any level. He may well be offering them senior roles in his own party, should they choose to join. More likely, these unreliable self-seeking politicos will swallow him whole, and his party with him.

But I am not unreasonable. Politicians should of course be allowed to resign, if they find themselves at odds with the policies of their own party. That is only fair and right. But it should come with consequences. The people that voted them in to those well-paid jobs did so because of the parties they represented. Someone voting Labour might not even have known the name of the candidate, and could have been voting out of loyalty to a party, or from their own basic political beliefs. The same applies to those who voted for the four Conservatives. They expected their elected members to support the party they voted for. Or what was the point of an election in the first place? So my proposal is that there should be a new election in every constituency where the member has chosen to resign from their party, and claim to be an ‘Independent’. Let them give up their lucrative jobs, finance their own campaigns, and then see if they really enjoy the support of the public that they still claim to represent.

But no, that won’t happen. The eleven people who claim to be so troubled by their ‘conscience’ were not troubled enough to leave behind the salaries, and the position of influence that comes with the job. Instead, they will just cause trouble, make vacuous statements, and continue to insist that they are doing the right thing by those who elected them.

And they will continue to draw that £77,400 ($101,130) a year salary, plus all expenses.

Oh yes.

Who Blinks First?

So the EU has refused all further negotiations. Donald Tusk has made his landmark comment about that ‘special place in Hell’, and we have a stalemate.

Well I am ‘old-school’. When I used to play cards, I didn’t blink. And faced with the possibility of the inevitable, I went ‘all in’.

So my message to Tusk is simple, if you will please forgive the expletive. “Donald, you can go and f**** yourself, and the horse you rode in on too”.

Forgive the repetition, but the UK is by far the largest trading customer of the EU. We buy more goods from them, than any other 19 nations combined. They have it all to lose, not us. But we sent a worm to do a lion’s job, so Mrs May will come back cap-in-hand, and whimper.

Let’s roll the dice. A no-deal Brexit, with a hard border with Ireland, the country that has caused all the problems. Slap on some tariffs, and watch Ireland squeal. Without the EU, that country would have collapsed long ago, little more than a banana republic. They sell us Guinness, and Irish Whiskey, also some butter. Just ban those imports, and listen to the crying.

It’s time to finally play ‘hard-ball’, something we should have been doing in July 2016.

A Busy Week In British Politics

It is only Thursday, but a lot has been happening this week. Mrs May’s attempt to get her pathetic Brexit ‘Deal’ through parliament was voted down with the biggest defeat ever seen in our political history. It’s important to note that. Ever since modern parliamentary democracy has existed in Britain, no government has ever suffered a defeat of anything like this margin. That fact alone should make this week historically memorable. Last night, the government survived a vote of no confidence. No surprise there, as most members of parliament put their jobs and careers before any principles.

But even that overwhelming rejection failed to impress the hapless Prime Minister to do the decent thing, and resign. Rarely has a leader enjoyed less popularity in their own party, and failed so completely in their negotiations with both the EU, the Opposition parties, and their own dissenters. Despite claiming to have worked hard to achieve the best possible deal for leaving the EU, it is apparent to anyone with a functioning brain that all Mrs May has done has been to return from Europe with the deal offered by the other member states, on their own terms, and a ‘take it or leave it’ basis.

I actually feel embarrassed that she doesn’t have sufficient honour to resign, and feels no shame in hanging on to her job, in the middle of this awful mess she has engineered.

Meanwhile, the opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn has been making speeches this morning. This former radical, one-time committed Socialist and reformer, now seems intent on one thing. Becoming the Prime Minister. He has gone back on many of his previous statements and promises, by now suggesting that ‘everything is on the table’, in the event of a Labour win in the election that is not actually happening, except in his mind. He refuses to rule out a second referendum, or the much-lauded ‘People’s Vote’, (same thing, different name) and reprises his own demand of remaining in the European Customs Union at all costs.

So, anyone who wants to really leave the EU has no leadership to look to. Both May and Corbyn were firm Remainers in 2016, and both have broken promises to abide by the will of the people, and ensure that Brexit happens when it should, deal or not. The disgruntled Remain voters have wasted two years using their best efforts to overturn the vote, that very ‘will of the people’ they love to crow about., and they now embrace the ideas that demand a ‘second try’, in the sure hope of getting what they wanted in 2016, which was Britain to stay as a member state of the EU.

We hear a lot about how Leave voters were misled. They were confused, lied to even. They didn’t want to leave with no deal, and most of them would now change their minds, and vote Remain. This is exactly what all this stalling, propaganda, and behind the scenes machinations have been about, for the last two years and more. Sowing the seeds of doubt, reassuring the leaders of EU nations that we won’t actually leave the EU, even if it says so ‘on the tin’. Disregarding that ‘will of the people’, because they have no respect for the people that had that will, and consider them to be inferior beings, unable to understand politics, and make up their own minds. It started on the day the result was announced in 2016, and has gone on unabated every day since.

Things always change, after votes and elections. But that doesn’t mean we get another go, at least not until the elected body has completed its term of office. I was unhappy that the Conservatives scraped through the last election. But can I get another one please? Can I change the result of the last one, because I don’t respect those who voted for it? Of course not. Like it or not, that is the system we live under.

At least it was supposed to be.

Time to go, I think

Brexit continues to dominate politics in the UK, and perhaps rightly so. Since the Leave vote won the referendum in 2016, so much stalling and pointless ‘negotiations’ have gone on, it seems to many of us that we will never leave. The date of the 29th of March, presumably ‘set in stone’ by Article 50, draws nearer, with no progress apparent in any of the much publicised ‘deals’.

Theresa May is looking increasingly desperate, even reaching out to opposition members of parliament for support, in the absence of any decent majority in her own party. Next week, she is odds-on to lose the vote over her ‘final deal’, in the House of Commons. That leaves just two options. A No-Deal ‘Hard’ Brexit, or her resignation, followed almost certainly by a General Election.

Labour is convinced that they could win a new election, though I’m not so sure. But one thing I am sure about is that we have a national leader who does not command the respect and confidence of the general public, and cannot rely on many of those on her own side.

It is time for this government, and its leader, to go.

Let’s face it, whatever replaces them is unlikely to be any worse.

(Fingers crossed…)