Posts
I wish my father (who fought for a referendum on our membership of the EU) was alive today to witness the unbelievable irony of Heseltine, Major, Blair and almost the entire establishment campaigning for... a(nother) referendum on our membership of the EU.
In 1981, the year Ronald Reagan became America's 40th President, 44.3 percent of the world lived in extreme poverty (i.e., less than $1.90 per person per day). Last year, it was 9.6 percent. That's a decline of 78 percent.
"Pope Francis’ own native Argentina was once among the leading economies of the world, before it was ruined by the kind of ideological notions he is now promoting around the world."
Until Asia Bibi is freed, Pakistan should not receive a penny of U.S. aid! Not one penny should go to any nation that persecutes or kills Christians!
At 16 I walked out on my abortion appointment, and now have a four-year-old boy who is the absolute love of my life. Shocking, it didn't ruin my life like everyone said it would! Positive stories like this are a necessity. Who says pro-choicers get to control the narrative?
This Trump statement on the Khashoggi murder is beyond embarrassing. It is shameful. He cites uncritically the MBS smear that Khashoggi was a traitor. He argues the U.S. can’t afford to alienate Riyadh due to oil+Iran. He is silent on our most important interest—Justice.
"Europe is belatedly discovering how unbelievably stupid it was to import millions of people from cultures that despise Western values and which often promote hatred toward the people who have let them in."
'desperate circumstances...'
ReplyDeleteThere is no obvious deal that is both acceptable to the EU and likely to pass in the House of Commons.
May’s hope, such as it is, is that desperate circumstances will lead unionists or euroskeptics to back down, or that impending crisis will realign parliamentary politics around centrist Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democratic politicians, who could coalesce temporarily to bring a deal through. For now, however, there is little visible evidence that this will happen. Even if there is a majority on paper for such a deal, May knows that it would probably break the Conservative Party in two. Rather, the odds of a no-deal Brexit that nearly no one wants keeps on rising, because there’s no better answer that people can unite around.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-kingdom/2018-11-20/no-deal-brexit-still-avoidable
No deal
It’s very easy to say “Parliament doesn’t want no deal” or “No government would ever let no deal happen”. The problem is that a no-deal exit is the default scenario. It’s what happens if no one blinks, or if everyone just assumes that “something” will prevent no deal. Given all the other scenarios require someone to give up their political project, risk electoral damage or potentially split their party, and everyone essentially assumes that someone else will decide that they are prepared to give up their political project, suffer electoral damage or split their party, we should be much more alive to the possibility that, despite everything, a no deal exit might actually happen.
Stephen Bush,
special correspondent at the New Statesman, the EI Political Commentator of the Year, and the PSA's Journalist of the Year.
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/elections/2018/11/theresa-may-s-deal-isn-t-going-pass-so-what-s-going-happen
Yanis Varoufakis: “The EU declared war and Theresa May played along”
“The UK should never have entered the negotiations,” he told me when we met afterwards. “You do not negotiate with the EU because the EU does not negotiate with you. It sends a bureaucrat, in this case it was Mr Barnier…they could have sent an android, or an algorithm.”
May’s fatal error, Varoufakis said, was to accept a two-phase negotiation: a divorce agreement followed by a new trade deal. “This was a declaration of war because Barnier said: ‘You will give us everything we want: money, people, Ireland. And only then will we discuss what you want.’ Well, that isn’t a negotiation, that’s a travesty. And Theresa May agreed to play along.”
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/brexit/2018/11/yanis-varoufakis-eu-declared-war-and-theresa-may-played-along