Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…
So Boris Johnson says: “Let the Healing Begin…” in his statement outside No. 10. Reminds me of Thatcher’s statement on the steps of No. 10 in 1979:
“Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope”.
Didn’t happen then. Won’t happen now. I despair for the future of the UK.
The full text of Sir Ivan Rogers’ lecture given at the University of Glasgow recently is here. He is both a careful analyst of events and a bellwether foretelling a future that is very likely to play out in the agonies of the Brexit to come.
With just nine days to go, First Dog on the Moon has published a handy voting guide to the UK general election. It’s definitely worth reading. Though I fear that his advice will be disregarded, and the current gang of “shits, charlatans and shysters”* will be returned to govern.
If there is a Tory majority, it will largely be because of their endlessly repeated slogan that they will “get Brexit done”. This means that Parliament will pass the Withdrawal Agreement, and Britain will leave the EU on 31 January 2020. However, Brexit is certainly not done, since the UK enters a new transition period during which the terms and conditions of multiple trade agreements and legislative frameworks have to be put in place. All of which leaves the future as uncertain as ever.
If you want a more in-depth analysis on what the future might hold, and the stances of the various players, then Chris Grey’s Brexit Blog and “What would ‘getting Brexit done’ mean?” is an excellent, and highly recommended, place to start.
*with acknowledgements to John Crace
That is how a number of letters begin that are published in today’s Guardian. From a range of public figures, they set out what Europe means to them.
I’m a Manxman by birth, but I’ve spent half my life living in the Netherlands. I owe a lot to Europe, just like these letter writers, and it distresses me to realise that many of my fellow Britons are hell-bent intent on closing boundaries, rather than opening them.
As far as I am concerned, the Guardian’s First Dog On The Moon sums up the clusterfuck that is Brexit very well indeed.
I see that the Guardian has updated its style guide to introduce terms that more accurately describe the environmental crises facing the world, using “climate emergency, crisis or breakdown” and “global heating” instead of “climate change” and “global warming”.
All the political insanity that is currently rampaging through the world at the moment surely pales into insignificance compared to the existential threat that is the ongoing climate crisis? Indeed the latter will only exacerbate the former as time goes on.
A few months back, I read The Uninhabitable Earth, by David Wallace-Wells. Yesterday, I read in one sitting, We Are The Weather, by Jonathan Safran Foer. Wallace-Wells is a journalist, Foer a novelist. As you might expect, the books are very different in style, whilst both dealing with the subject of the climate crisis.
Foer’s book is a mixture of styles in itself, ranging from thought-provoking essays, to shocks to the brain from short chapters giving lists of factoids, to a “dispute with the soul” – a dialogue with himself over why it is that we seem unable to deal with the fact of the climate crisis. That’s all of us, whether you accept the science or deny it.
Foer offers a path to help mitigate the extent of the crisis: switch to a plant-based diet from a meat-based one. The link between farming animals and the climate crisis is the backbone of his book, and he makes a persuasive case. Livestock are the leading source of methane emissions, whilst nitrous oxide is emitted by livestock urine, manure, and the fertilisers used for growing crops. Nitrous oxide has significant global warming potential as a greenhouse gas. On a per-molecule basis, considered over a 100-year period, nitrous oxide has 298 times the atmospheric heat-trapping ability of carbon dioxide.
The Netherlands has just woken up to this inconvenient truth about nitrous oxide and other nitrogen compounds. We currently have what is known as the Stikstofcrisis (the nitrogen crisis), which arose this year when permit applications for an estimated 18,000 construction and infrastructure projects were stopped. Too high a concentration of these nitrogen compounds leads to a deterioration of nature and to a loss of biodiversity. A reported 61 percent of the nitrogen compounds produced comes from agriculture, with intensive livestock farming being one of the most important sources. So the farmers are up in arms about this, seeing the government placing the blame for the crisis on their shoulders. There have been protests and demonstrations.
The trouble is, we simply can’t go on as we did before. Things will have to change, but that process will be a painful one, whatever we do.
A very perceptive piece by Joris Luyendijk in the Guardian today. His thesis is that
The UK now seems to be the country whose government lies about nonexistent negotiations with the EU while threatening to renege on its outstanding financial obligations – often misrepresented as the “divorce bill”.
and:
The dominant four newspapers in Britain by circulation are the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Sun on Sunday and the Mail on Sunday, with the more measured but equally pro-Brexit Sunday Times coming in fifth. Each of these publications has been brainwashing its readers with fake news about the EU for years – in some cases, decades – while building up pro-Brexit politicians and stoking divisions. Terms such as “betrayal”, “surrender”, “plots by traitors” and “enemies of the people” are on the front pages routinely. The top 10 British papers by paid circulation does not feature any pro-European newspaper, unless you count the Daily Mirror. It does feature Boris Johnson’s mouthpiece, the Daily Telegraph, and the triumphantly nasty Daily Star. It is a depressing tally, scarcely improved by knowing how many people rely on social media for their news.
Depressing is not the half of it. It’s the realisation that my fellow Britons swallow these lies from Boris Johnson, his colleagues and the Tory press, and believe them wholeheartedly. I feel ashamed to be British and fear for the future of the UK. My touchstone is that I also hold Dutch nationality, and hence I am also a citizen of the EU. It is the lifeline to which I can cling. It remains to be seen whether UK citizens will be able to do the same.
Boris Johnson continues to demonstrate why he is totally unfit to be Prime Minister of Britain.
As a friend said: “He’s a completely and utterly self-serving bastard for using her death to promote his political agenda. We have come to expect nothing less from him.”
The real horror was the realisation that he was being cheered on by his Conservative party colleagues. Have they no decency? Well, rhetorical question, I suppose. Clearly they have not.
Jos Collignon, the political cartoonist of the Dutch Volkskrant newspaper sums up the shenanigans of Boris Johnson and his gang of shits, charlatans and shysters (thank you, John Crace) pretty accurately this week…
I see Farage has muscled in on the act as well…
I think John Crace has the measure of Boris Johnson and his choices for the cabinet in the UK’s new, and hopefully very brief, government.
Addendum: a comment on another article in today’s Guardian sums it up quite nicely:
So now you have a narcissistic pathological liar as PM, a home secretary who supports the death penalty, a chancellor who was a casino banker for Deutsche Bank prior to the 2008 crash, a foreign secretary who doesn’t know why Dover is important for the British economy and who wants to shut down Parliament, a trade secretary who almost got a mental breakdown over cheese imports and a scarecrow as environment secretary.
What could possibly go wrong?
We have just entered a region of severe turbulence. Boris Johnson has become Prime Minister of Britain.
Verily, I say unto you: Be afraid – be very afraid.
This is not going to end well for any of us, citizens of the UK or the EU alike.
It’s been instructive to observe how accurate the diplomatic briefings of Kim Darroch have been. And also how cowardly the likely next Prime Minister of Britain (I can no longer find it in myself to write “Great Britain”) is being.
As the Guardian states: Kim Darroch has effectively been sacked by Boris Johnson on the orders of Donald Trump.
It’s worth repeating the final paragraph:
Johnson will go through the doors of Downing Street at some point this month smiling and wanting to be loved, but many will instead see him, as one interviewer, Eddie Mair, described him, as “a nasty piece of work”. In the words of the chairman of the foreign affairs select committee, Tom Tugendhat, a former army officer: “Leaders stand up for their men. They encourage them to try and defend them when they fail.”
Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, another “nasty piece of work” continues to pump out his poison to the world.
I’ve never had time for Ann Widdicombe. Her callousness and stupidity have been self-evident for years. Now she has re-invented herself as an MEP. And she’s still spouting stupidity. She and Farage make a pretty pair. They are in Brussels simply to wreck the EU in any way they can, and pocket the pay and pension from the EU whilst doing it. I despair.
Addendum: Marina Hyde sums up the Widdicombe spectacle better than I could. Read and despair.
As we get ever closer to the point where the UK’s Tory Party crowns the appalling Boris Johnson as their next leader and the country’s next Prime Minister, voices are beginning to be raised urging them to reconsider. Max Hastings has a particularly hard-hitting demolition of Boris in today’s Guardian. Sample zingers:
Like many showy personalities, he is of weak character. I recently suggested to a radio audience that he supposes himself to be Winston Churchill, while in reality being closer to Alan Partridge.
Johnson would not recognise truth, whether about his private or political life, if confronted by it in an identity parade.
If the Johnson family had stuck to showbusiness like the Osmonds, Marx Brothers or von Trapp family, the world would be a better place. Yet the Tories, in their terror, have elevated a cavorting charlatan to the steps of Downing Street, and they should expect to pay a full forfeit when voters get the message.
The sad thing is that Max has been telling us all the truth about Boris since at least 2012. Why is it that no-one is prepared to listen?
Jonathan Cook discusses the the assault by Mark Field on a climate change activist this week, and points out the bigger picture. He states that we are in danger of getting sidetracked. Worth reading.
These are disturbing times. Forget about the ongoing disaster that is climate change, and disasters such as Trump and Brexit. Let’s focus for a moment on the buttock-clenching mini-disaster that is the UK’s Conservative Party’s odyssey to choose their next leader – who will also become the UK’s next Prime Minister.
They will almost certainly choose the unremittingly dreadful Boris Johnson, but frankly, the field of candidates that they have to choose from is pretty dire. The one candidate who appears slightly different is Rory Stewart.
However, if you look at his voting record in Parliament, it is nothing to write home about. Ash Sarkar nails it.
In short – people in the UK, you’re doomed. We are all going to suffer the consequences.
But clearly, some are still more equal than others…
A walk from the Westerbork Nazi transit camp to Groningen as part of the “Night of the Refugee” fundraising activities has been cancelled after the organisers faced death threats and intimidation.
What really galls is that Thierry Baudet described the sponsored walk as “scandalous”, and Esther Voet, the editor of the Jewish newspaper Nieuw Israelietische Weekblad said it was “Tasteless”.
Perhaps Baudet and Voet should be reminded of the poem written by Martin Niemöller: “First they came…”
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