Category: Europe

Populism Done Right, UK Edition

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By being the first Labour leader in a generation to actually take that whole “labo(u)r” bit seriously, Jeremy Corbyn has presided over an explosion in interest and members:

Jeremy Corbyn’s hopes of remoulding Labour have been boosted by a detailed Guardian survey into the party at grassroots level that shows overwhelming support for him, a decisive shift to the left and unhappiness with squabbling among MPs.

 The Guardian has interviewed Labour secretaries, chairs, other office holders and members from more than 100 of the 632 constituencies in England, Scotland and Wales. Almost every constituency party across the country we contacted reported doubling, trebling, quadrupling or even quintupling membership, and a revival of branches that had been moribund for years and close to folding.

 100 Labour officials from across Britain tell of the new members surging to join the party, some young idealists, some returning prodigals – and one who was last a member when Harold Wilson was prime minister

 Reflecting increased interest among the young, university cities and towns recorded some of the biggest rises, with Bath jumping from 300 to 1,322 members (911 full members, 120 affiliated supporters and 291 registered supporters) and Colchester from 200-250 to almost 1,000. Neither are traditional Labour seats.

 The survey findings are borne out by Labour’s national figures, released to the Guardian in a break with party tradition of keeping them secret. Membership jumped from 201,293 on 6 May last year, the day before the general election, to 388,407 on 10 January.

The Blairites, of course, of course are apoplectic, because they think that the “Wrong Sort” are joining, even at a 10:1 ratio of joiners to leavers.

But if the strikingly good membership numbers have the Blairites freaking out, then Corbyn’s proposals to limit excessive executive pay has their heads exploding:

Companies would be banned from paying senior executives vastly higher wages than junior employees, and would not be allowed to hand out dividends until all staff were earning the Living Wage, under plans signalled today by Jeremy Corbyn.

The Labour leader, who is setting out proposals to close the gap between top earners and low-paid staff, will commit the party to act to “institutionalise fairness”.

He also repeated his support for bringing the railways back into public ownership and for “democratic control” of the energy giants.

Mr Corbyn’s critics, both inside and outside the party, will seize on his plans as evidence that he is trying to drive its platform to the left. Any move to intervene in company pay is also bound to face fierce criticism from business.

But the Labour leader’s allies insist his commitment to tackling inequality will strike a chord with the public who are dismayed by the excesses of company bosses.

Mr Corbyn told a Fabian conference in London: “Too much of the proceeds of growth have accumulated to those at the top.”

He argued: “Everyone benefits when companies succeed. One proposal is pay ratios between top and bottom, so that the rewards don’t just accrue to those at the top.

………

Mr Corbyn also floated a plan to ban or restrict firms from distributing dividends to shareholders if they are not paying the Living Wage to all staff. “Only profitable employers will be paying dividends. If they depend on cheap labour for those profits, then I think there is a question over whether that is a business model to which we should be turning a blind eye.”

He pointed to research by the OECD which concluded that failure to distribute wealth more evenly hinders economic growth. “A more equal society is not only fairer, it does better in terms of economic stability and wealth creation,” he said.

The Labour leader argued that train fares would fall and investment increase if the railways were returned to public ownership. “It would be governed not remotely from Whitehall, but by passengers, rail workers and politicians, local and national,” he added.

Bringing gas and electricity companies under “democratic control” would also help to reduce costs and ease the transition to carbon-free energy supplies, he claimed.

Without excessive executive compensation, how will Blairites cash in when they retire from politics?

We’ve had about 40 years of so-called liberal politicians buying into conservative framing, and the only beneficiaries are the top 1% of the top 1%.

It’s time for a change.

The Taste of Blairite Tears Is So Sweet

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Following weeks of backbiting and sabotage from his front benchers, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is cleaning house, and the whining has reached a crescendo:

Jeremy Corbyn has launched a strong defence of his controversial frontbench reshuffle, saying it has made Labour “stronger, more diverse and more coherent” as he insists he can lead the party to general election victory.

Writing in the Observer after a turbulent week, Corbyn says his election as leader in September reflected a “deep-seated desire for change and a new direction in our politics” which, unsurprisingly, some in the party are finding difficult to adjust to. In terms that may alarm some of his MPs, who fear he is trying to bypass the parliamentary party over issues such as the renewal of Trident, he makes it clear that he will shape new policies through the “democratic participation of our own hugely expanded party and supporters”.

In a call for loyalty, Corbyn says the Tories under David Cameron are engaged in a systematic attempt to undermine democracy and that this must be challenged by Labour. He argues that new rules on voter registration, attempts to cut the number of parliamentary seats and slash funding for Labour amount to an unprecedented attack on democratic rights and freedoms.

However, his attempts to impose unity will come under further strain on Sunday when an MP appointed to head a key policy review on tax credits and child poverty will resign on BBC TV, in protest at being branded by the leadership as part of a “rightwing clique”.

After three frontbenchers quit in protest at Corbyn’s reshuffle, Alison McGovern, MP for Wirral South, will launch a bitter attack on John McDonnell, Corbyn’s close ally and shadow chancellor, who said last week that the pressure group Progress, which she chairs, is full of people with “hard-right” conservative views.

Her appearance on the BBC’s Sunday Politics will also fuel a row that has erupted between Labour and the BBC over its coverage of the reshuffle, and comes as tensions over Corbyn’s attempts to change party policy on Trident reach new heights.

Oh you poor delicate flowers.

Corbyn fired back in The Guardian, noting just that Cameron is attempting to systematically dismantle all opposition in the UK, both on a political and a policy level.

It won’t matter for New Labour.

They honestly think that the Conservatives running the country is better than having a Labour Party that actually gives a sh%$ about ordinary people.

After all, they have to think about their post politics career working for the City of London, Britain’s financial industry.

Spain is Going Pear Shaped

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In response to the election result the representatives of the center-left Socialist Party met with the Mariano Rajoy of the right-wing Peoples Party, but only to tell him to piss off:

The arduous task of assembling a new government for Spain got off to a bad start on Wednesday after the leader of the Socialist party flatly ruled out any deal with the Popular party of prime minister Mariano Rajoy.

Pedro Sánchez, the leader of the Socialists, held a brief meeting with Mr Rajoy in the prime ministerial compound outside Madrid — but apparently only to reiterate his opposition to any accord.

“We will vote against the Popular party and against Mariano Rajoy as prime minister. Voters have asked for change,” he told a news conference after the meeting.

The meeting was the first encounter between two party leaders since the inconclusive general election last Sunday. Spanish voters delivered a deeply fragmented parliament in which the two mainstream parties — the centre-right PP and the centre-left Socialists (PSOE) — will have a much-reduced presence.

The PP will be the strongest bloc in parliament once again, but it remains 53 seats shy of an absolute majority in the 350-seat chamber. The Socialists will be a distant second, followed by the upstart anti-austerity Podemos movement.

A second new entrant is the centrist Ciudadanos party, whose 40 deputies will make a useful addition to any alliance but are not enough to hand a majority to the PP on their own.

Much like in Greece, and Portugal, the two mainstream parties have been following a consensus that is opposed what appears to be a majority of the electorate, which has the electorate moving far right and far left.

Unfortunately, the response of Brussels to this trend is to become even more opaque and undemocratic.

It is a recipe for disaster.

Poland is Being Poland Again

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Most of the Jews of Poland died in the Holocaust.

Many of the rest fled following antisemitic incidents post WW II.

But Poland is Poland, and they won’t let an absence of Jews get in the way of blaming them for everything:

When some 50,000 people turned out in Warsaw recently to protest a plan by Poland’s ruling party to pack the nation’s constitutional court, the hard right-wing political faction responded quickly with a counter-demonstration of its own. Its counter-protest featured, among other things, a placard that mocked those claiming to defend democracy as “the committee to defend Jewish-Communist wealth.”

At around the same time in Wroclaw, Poland’s fourth largest city, crowds at a parallel demonstration to support the recently elected Law and Justice party shouted, “Wroclaw is being de-Polanized as the Jews are buying up homes in the city.”

At another Wroclaw demonstration, held November 18 to protest a European Union plan that would see Poland admit some 7,000 Syrian refugees, demonstrators denounced the proposed immigrants as Islamists — and to somehow add to this point, they set fire to a previously prepared effigy of a Hasidic Jew holding the E.U. flag.

God, Honor and Fatherland,” the crowd then chanted.

Some things never change.

H/t the inner walls

*Google the Kielce Pogrom.

This is Repugnant

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It appears that the Danes have have become the Donald Trumps of Europe:

Denmark vows to strip refugees of their valuables to help pay for the cost of resettlement. Weddings rings are off limits.

As if refugees needed yet another reason not to want to resettle in Denmark after the country placed “Don’t come here” ads in Arabic newspapers over the summer, now the country warns it will strip immigrants of their valuables.

The latest anti-refugee sentiment came closer to reality on Sunday when Denmark’s parliament debated a measure that would allow border police to strip incoming refugees of all valuables and cash worth over €300 to help offset costs of resettlement, according to Swedish STV television.

After some discussion, the Danish government apparently decided that refugees could keep their wedding rings, cellphones, and laptops in the measure that will eventually go up for a vote. At least one Danish parliamentarian reportedly insisted that wedding rings with a diamond over a certain carat weight should also be confiscated.

Sören Pind, Denmark’s immigration minister, told Danish television that the plan was the only way the country could afford to house the refugees seeking asylum. “I’m talking about a situation in which there are personal items of significant value but no sentimental worth,” Pind told the television station. “I’m talking about a situation in which a man comes along with a case full of diamonds and asks for protection in Denmark. That’s only fair.”

Fair, perhaps, in that strange world in which theft is OK. The measure, whether it eventually passes or not, raises the question of whether certain European countries really think it is OK to repeat the Nazi approach to immigration, during which the confiscation of valuables was the practice.

I’m with the Danish journalist who said, “Having armed men indiscriminately seize refugees’ personal belongings doesn’t strike me as the best representation of a free society.”

But wait there’s more:

Denmark has promised that any of the 13,000 asylum seekers who are eventually granted a right to stay will be forced to live in segregated tent camps erected in two tent cities and that they will defy European standards and triple the normal waiting period for family reunification as a further deterrent.

So, stealing their stuff, and putting them in internment camps.

This?  From the Danes?

What do they think they are?  Germans?

Good News, at Least in the Short Term

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The right wing National Front, after scoring a stunning win in the initial round of regional elections in France, struck out in the 2nd, and final, round of elections:

France’s far-right Front National has failed to win control of any regions in the final round of local elections despite a historically high score in the first-round when it was ranked as the most popular party in France.

The defeat of FN was down to mass tactical voting, an increase in turnout and warnings by the left that what it called the “antisemitic and racist” party would bring France to its knees. All this combined to stop FN translating its huge first-round score of nearly 28% into the overall control of any region.

After big gains by the Front National in regional elections, leftwing voters in some areas are being asked to vote for the rightwing Les Républicains party

But the far-right party still won a record number of votes in the final round: at least 6.6m, handing a significant boost to the party leader Marine Le Pen’s bid to run for president in 2017.

………

Exit polls on Sunday night showed that, with less than 18 months to go until the next French presidential election, the nationalist, anti-immigration, anti-European FN still gained hundreds of regional councillors across France — tripling its presence on regional councils and extending its nationwide reach, cementing its grassroots powerbase and boosting its quest for power nationwide.  

 ………

 Addressing her supporters, Le Pen presented her party as the victim of “calumny and defamation” by the government who she said had “intimidated and infantilised” voters by teaming up with its rivals on the right to keep FN out of power. She said her party’s rise was inexorable.

She said the tactical voting by leftwingers who chose Nicolas Sarkozy’s rightwing Les Républicains party in order to put up a “barricade” against FN had already played into her claim that she and her voters were the victims of an elitist system that persecuted them. She vowed during the campaign that her voters would take their revenge by turning out in even greater numbers during the presidential campaign.

Le Pen herself failed to capitalise on her high first-round score in the vast northern region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie, after the Socialist party pulled out of the race and made an extraordinary plea for its voters to choose Sarkozy’s candidate Xavier Bertrand just to stop Le Pen. First estimations showed that Bertrand, Sarkozy’s former employment minister, won with a resounding 57% of the vote, with Le Pen taking 42.8%.

Right wing populist parties, like the FN, live off feelings of betrayal by the “elites”, and this election, where Socialist candidates withdrew from the elections to provide a firewall against the FN, plays into this narrative.

I expect for Marine Le Pen to make it into the 2nd round of the Presidential elections next time around as a result of this.

Considering that both current President Holland and former President Sarkozy are both about as popular as as a case of the Clap, we are going to see a lot more nose holding of voters in upcoming elections.

F%$# Donald Trump for Making Boris Johnson Look Wise

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The fact that Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, who can best be described as little more than a life support system for his hair, can appear wise when talking about Donald Trump is an indication of just how wrong and disturbing the whole phenomenon of Trump’s political ascendance is:

London’s mayor, the conservative politician Boris Johnson, also chimed in.

“As a city where more than 300 languages are spoken, London has a proud history of tolerance and diversity and to suggest there are areas where police officers cannot go because of radicalization is simply ridiculous,” he said.

“The only reason I wouldn’t go to some parts of New York is the real risk of meeting Donald Trump,” Johnson quipped.

We live in Bizarro World.

This is Not a Surprise

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The Euroskeptic and nativist National Front just crushed the first round of regional elections in France:

French mainstream politicians have struggled to come up with a response to what one analyst described as the “major hangover” of a historic victory by the Front National in the first round of regional elections.

 While the far-right had been predicted to do well, the FN’s record score of almost 28% of the national vote and first place in six of the country’s 13 regions by Sunday night left the traditional parties reeling.

 The governing Socialist party came third as expected, but analysts agreed on Monday that the main loser was the centre-right opposition party Les Républicains, led by the former president Nicolas Sarkozy.

………

In 2010 the FN scored about 11% of the national vote in the regional elections. Support for the FN has risen steadily since 2011 when Le Pen took control of the party from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and set out to shed its racist and xenophobic image.

This is not a surprise.

Germany seems determined to repeat the policies that made its depression the worst in Europe in the 1930s, and now it has the power to enforce on most of the rest of Europe.

What’s more, the European Union has prosecuted further integration in a manner calculated to vitiate any semblance of meaning public input.

The juxtaposition of these two is a petri dish for anti-EU populists, but the populist left remains firmly committed to the European Union, so the only meaning alternative is the bigots, racists, and Fascists.

We will see more of this.

Germany Finally Does Something Useful for Greece

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It appears that Germany had combed through the data that it has managed to obtain from various tax havens, and has turned over to Greece the names of over 10,000 tax cheats:

Germany has handed Athens the names of more than 10,000 of its citizens suspected of dodging taxes with holdings in Swiss banks.

The inventory, which details bank accounts worth €3.6bn – almost twice the last instalment of aid Athens secured from creditors earlier this week – was given to the Greek finance ministry in an effort to help the country raise tax revenues.

They could have done this at the beginning of the whole crisis, and done a lot more to help both the Greek people and the Euro Zone.

The Germans wanted their pound of flesh, though, so it’s taken 3 years for them to turn over this data.

Another Right Wing Meme Slain by Facts

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It appears that everyone involved with the Paris attacks are European nationals, not refugees:

All of the attackers from Friday’s massacre in Paris so far have been identified as European Union nationals, according to a top EU official. The announcement further casts doubt on the validity of a Syrian passport found near the bodies of a slain attacker.

“Let me underline, the profile of the terrorists so far identified tells us this is an internal threat,” Federica Mogherini, the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy/Vice-President of the European Commission, said after a meeting with EU foreign ministers. “It is all EU citizens so far. This can change with the hours, but so far it is quite clear it is an issue of internal domestic security.”

Needless to say, the right wing pants wetting fear will continue unimpeded by the facts.

Two Suggestions for Dealing with the Paris and Lebanon Attacks

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Three teams of Islamic State attackers acting in unison carried out the terrorist assault in Paris on Friday night, officials said Saturday, including one assailant who may have traveled to Europe on a Syrian passport along with the flow of migrants.

“It is an act of war that was committed by a terrorist army, a jihadist army, Daesh, against France,” President François Hollande told the nation from the Élysée Palace, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “It is an act of war that was prepared, organized and planned from abroad, with complicity from the inside, which the investigation will help establish.”

As the death toll rose to 129 — with 352 others wounded, 99 of them critically — a basic timeline of the attacks came into view.

The Paris prosecutor, François Molins, said the attackers were all armed with assault rifles and suicide vests. Their assault began at 9:20 p.m. Friday, when one terrorist detonated a suicide bomb outside the gates of the soccer stadium on the northern outskirts of Paris. It ended at 12:20 a.m. Saturday when the authorities stormed a concert hall, the Bataclan. One attacker there was killed; two others detonated suicide vests. Inside the hall, 89 people, who had been listening to a rock band, had been shot to death.

Meanwhile, we see very little coverage of what happened the day before in Beriut:

A fiery double suicide bombing terrorized a mostly Shiite residential area of southern Beirut on Thursday, ripping through a busy shopping district at rush hour. The Lebanese Health Ministry said at least 43 people had been killed and more than 200 wounded in the worst attack to strike the city in years.

 The Islamic State extremist group, which controls parts of neighboring Syria, claimed responsibility for the attack. The group portrayed its motives as baldly sectarian, saying it had targeted Shiite Muslims, whom it views as apostates. It mentioned almost as an afterthought that it had targeted Hezbollah, the Shiite militant organization that backs the Syrian government in the civil war raging next door.

 Hezbollah maintains tight security control in the district that was hit, and the bombing seemed aimed at hurting the group by attacking civilians in an area where it has many supporters. But the stricken area also typifies working-class Beirut, where Palestinians, Christians and Syrian refugees (mostly Sunnis) live, work and shop.

First, I think that we need to understand that this is state sponsored terrorism:

It is long past time for the oligarchies of the Gulf states to stop paying protection to the men in the suicide belts. Their societies are stunted and parasitic. The main job of the elites there is to find enough foreign workers to ensla…er…indenture to do all the real work. The example of Qatar and the interesting business plan through which that country is building the facilities for the 2022 World Cup is instructive here. Roughly the same labor-management relationship exists for the people who clean the hotel rooms and who serve the drinks. In Qatar, for people who come from elsewhere to work, passports have been known to disappear into thin air. These are the societies that profit from terrible and tangled web of causation and violence that played out on the streets of Paris. These are the people who buy their safety with the blood of innocents far away.

It’s been known for years that these regimes, in particularly the House of Saud, have been ATMs for the terror movement for decades.

To that particularly unsavory lot, we need to add our NATO ally Turkey, where the increasingly autocratic and delusional Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who had decided to throw in for Sunni fundamentalist hegemony for his neighbor to the south, which is also his goal for Turkey.

Quiet diplomacy is not working with these folks. They need to be named, shamed, and sanctioned.

Additionally, changing the goal in Syria, and actively supporting the Assad regime as the best of a bad lot, which has the advantage of being true, and also has the effect of thwarting the goals or Turkey and the potentates on the Persian Gulf, and letting them know that they have crossed a line.

The fact that the Assad regime is that best alternative for the Syrian people and the world is a very real indictment of Western foreign policy.

It Just Got Real in Spain

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The Catalan Assembly has voted to start the secession process in Spain:

Catalonia’s parliament passed a motion declaring the start of the process for breaking away from Spain, a move Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy says is illegal.

The resolution was approved by 72 votes to 63, Carme Forcadell, the president of the regional assembly said Monday after the debate in parliament. Rajoy said he’ll ask the Constitutional Court to block the decision in a televised statement after the vote.

“Today we are solemnly starting a new state, a Catalan state, a republic, a Catalan republic,” Raul Romeva, parliamentary leader of the main separatist group, told lawmakers during the debate. “This was our commitment during the electoral campaign.”

The regional parliament is pushing ahead with its bid for independence even though it is yet to elect a regional leader, after September’s election left the main separatist alliance led by acting president Artur Mas short of a majority. The anti-capitalist party CUP, which backed the separatist motion, opposes Mas’s candidacy because of his support for business and the reports of corruption within his party. The assembly is due to vote on the presidency later Monday.

I’m not sure if this is a real move toward secession, or if it is some sort posturing about the selection for a President, but in either case, this has a real possibility of getting really ugly really fast.

It might not go pear shaped, but I wouldn’t buy any real estate in Spain for the next few months.

Jeremy Corbyn Goes There

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He just (rightly, IMNSHO) accused Britain’s Chief of the Defence Staff General Nicholas Houghton of attempting to meddle in civilian politics:

British Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn accused the country’s armed forces chief on Sunday of taking sides in the hot button political issue of overhauling Britain’s nuclear weapons program.

Gen. Nicholas Houghton earlier on Remembrance Sunday, when Britain commemorates its war dead, said he was “worried” by Corbyn’s vow never to press the “nuclear button”.

Corbyn issued a statement expressing “serious concern” over Houghton’s statement, calling on Defence Secretary Michael Fallon to “take action.”

“It is a matter of serious concern that the chief of the defence staff has today intervened directly in issues of political dispute,” said Corbyn, who is opposed to a revamp of Britain’s nuclear weapons system, Trident.

“It is essential in a democracy that the military remains politically neutral at all times,” said the Labour leader.

Corbyn is right, of course, Houghton’s behavior is unacceptable in a democracy, particularly when juxtaposed with long time rumors of military preparations for a coup in 1974.

One hopes that Houghton will learn his lesson, and shut the f%$# up.

Well, at Least One Head of State May Pay for the Iraqi Debacle

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In the UK, the Chilcot commission has conducted a serious investigation how the Tony Blair government came to join in the Iraq invasion.

The report has not been reported to the public, but leaks are coming out, and the latest leak that ministers were instructed to burn the attorney general’s opinion which cast the invasion into doubt, and this one is big, because it demonstrates a direct knowledge that the invasion was on (at best) shaky legal ground, and that there was an active and aggressive cover-up of this:

Tony Blair has denied reports that ministers were instructed to ‘burn’ a report questioning the legality of the Iraq war less than three weeks before British forces invaded the country.

The Mail on Sunday quotes an unnamed senior No 10 figure saying that the then attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, presented a 13-page legal opinion on 7 March 2003 that suggested the war could be challenged under international law because of the lack of UN backing.

The paper’s source says: “There was pandemonium. The date when war was expected to start was already in the diary, and here was Goldsmith saying it could be challenged under international law. They said ‘burn it, destroy it’ and got to work on the [attorney general].”

………

On Thursday, Sir John Chilcot announced he would publish his long-awaited report into the Iraq war in June or July next year, giving government officials up to three months to carry out national security checks on its findings. In a letter to the prime minister, Chilcot said the text of his report – which is expected to be around 2 million words long – would be finalised in the week of 18 April 2016.

Blair’s office denied that he was the cause of the delay, saying he had replied to documents he received as part of the Maxwellisation process – in which witnesses who are to be criticised are given a right to reply – in August this year after receiving them in January.

Someone within the Chilcot commission has concerns that this report is going to get buried, and so stuff is leaking out.

Assuming that this report is accurate, and it certainly smells true, it creates a real possibility of some sort of repercussions to Tony “The Smiler”, even if it is just making him toxic enough that foreign governments who have been paying him big bucks (Pounds) as a “consultant” might terminate their deals.

I’d like to see him in the Hague, along with Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, and the rest of their Evil Minions™, but that is not going to happen.

It’s Good Policy. It’s Good Politics, and So the Tories and the Lib-Dems Will Not Support It

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But all the leaders of the other major parties are demanding that the National Heal Service be protected against predatory investors:

Leaders of almost every major political party in the United Kingdom have signed an appeal not to allow a transatlantic trade deal known as TTIP become the Trojan horse that allows American business interests to take over the NHS.

The appeal, organised by the trade union Unite, has achieved the rare feat of bringing together all of Northern Ireland’s main political parties. TTIP, or the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, would free up trade between the US and the EU, by allowing companies from either side of the Atlantic to operate under the same rules.

One of its most controversial elements would be the creation of a new supranational court, the Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) through which foreign investors could sue governments, or the EU, over any action or legislation that hurt their businesses. It is feared that an American private healthcare firm which was prevented from buying up part of the NHS would be able to go to the ISDS and claim millions of pounds in compensation from the British government for lost business.

………

The appeal has also been signed by the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, the Ukip leader Nigel Farage, the Green Party leader Natalie Bennett, and Plaid Cymru leader Leanne Wood, and by Peter Robinson of the Democratic Unionist Party, and Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness.


The organisers, from Unite, say that they approached the Conservatives asking for support but were refused, and are awaiting a reply from the Liberal Democrats.

The Tories have been wanting to privatize the NHS since it began operations in 1948, and the Liberal Democrats have specialized in being completely useless and ineffectual since before Lloyd George died, so their actions are not surprising.

Unfortunately, in the mad rush for a bad deal, it is very likely that privatized healthcare, with its associated excessive spending and poor health outcomes, will be in the UK’s future.

This is not a Surprise

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As far as trade agreements are concerned, the recent focus here on Techdirt and elsewhere has been on TPP as it finally achieved some kind of agreement — what kind, we still don’t know, despite promises that the text would be released as soon as it was finished. But during this time, TPP’s sibling, TAFTA/TTIP, has been grinding away slowly in the background. It’s already well behind schedule — there were rather ridiculous initial plans to get it finished by the end of last year — and there’s now evidence of growing panic among the negotiators that they won’t even get it finished by the end of President Obama’s second term, which would pose huge problems in terms of ratification.

One sign of that panic is that the original ambitions to include just about everything are being jettisoned, as it becomes clear that in some sectors — cosmetics, for example — the US and EU regulatory approaches are just too different to reconcile. Another indicator is an important leaked document obtained by the Guardian last week. It’s the latest (29 September) draft proposal for the chapter on sustainable development. What emerges from every page of the document, embedded below, is that the European Commission is now so desperate for a deal — any deal — that it has gone back on just about every promise it made (pdf) to protect the environment and ensure that TTIP promoted sustainable development. Three environmental groups — the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth Europe and PowerShift — have taken advantage of this leak to offer an analysis of the European Commission’s real intent in the environmental field. They see four key problems:

The leaked text fails to provide any adequate defense for environment-related policies likely to be undermined by TTIP. For example, nothing in the text would prevent foreign corporations from launching challenges against climate or other environmental policies adopted on either side of the Atlantic in unaccountable trade tribunals.

The environmental provisions are vaguely worded, creating loopholes that would allow governments to continue environmentally harmful practices. The chapter lacks any obligation to ratify multilateral agreements that would bolster environmental protection and includes a set of vague goals with respect to biological diversity, illegal wildlife trade, and chemicals.

The leaked text includes several provisions that the European Commission may claim as “safeguards,” such as a recognition of the “right of each Party determine its sustainable development policies and priorities” but none would effectively shield environmental policies from being challenged by rules in TTIP.

There is no enforcement mechanism for any of the provisions mentioned in the text. Even if one were included, it would still be weaker than the enforcement mechanism provided for foreign investors either through the investor-state dispute settlement mechanism or the renamed investment court system.

This is how this is really supposed to work.

You make promises to protect the people, and then declare that an agreement is essential, so you cannot keep those promises.

The goals of these deals are, and have been for as long as I remember, has been to screw the ordinary citizen at the for the benefit of the already obscenely rich.

Jeremy Corbyn Just Pulled a Fairly Savvy Political Move

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One of the main reasons for Labour’s pasting by the Tories in the last election, aside from Ed Millibrand trying to run as a phony Tory, was that Scotland, a traditional Labour stronghold, turfed out nearly the entire party.

Corbyn’s solution is to create ‘federal’ Scottish Labour party with significant autonomy:

Britain’s opposition Labour Party haemorrhaged Scottish voters and seats in this year’s General Election but newly installed leader Jeremy Corbyn may have a novel new way to get Scots back on the party’s side.

His idea is to hive off Scottish Labour altogether, meaning that the party north of the border will be able to propose tailor-made policies that are more attractive to voters in Scotland.

Policies on welfare and Trident, Britain’s nuclear weapons programme, are said to be targeted by Scottish Labour.

Corbyn, who won by a landslide leadership victory vote just over a month ago, told The Sunday Times that he is aiming to create a “federal” party in Scotland.

Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale supports this idea as she aims to tell parliament on Monday that Labour will seek greater “autonomy” in Scotland and use the powers of Holyrood [the capitol district of Edinburgh, Scotland] to have greater control over policies such as welfare.

………

Not everyone in Labour is happy about. One source inside the party’s National Executive Committee told The Times, “This looks worryingly like Jeremy Corbyn and Kezia Dugdale are trying to sneak through a secret plan to break up the Labour party.”

………

The Labour Party depends on voter support from Scotland. Usually, according to electoral data, Scots vote for the Scottish National Party or Labour. In 2010, Scottish voter support for Labour cratered and the party lost 91 seats across Britain. The Scottish National Party stayed the same with only 6 seats.

However, the Scottish referendum in September 2014 boosted support for the SNP. In the 2015 General Election, Labour was more or less wiped out in Scotland, and the SNP gained 50 seats. The former Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont resigned a month after the referendum and quipped that the Labour party north of the border was being treated like a “branch office.”

So, Corbyn’s plans to create a federal party seems to be a good idea to win back voters.

Labour has taken Scotland for granted for decades, and in the last election, they literally ran against Scotland, publicly refusing to deal with the Scottish National Party under any circumstances, even if it means that Labour would be unable to form a coalition government.

Obviously, there are some issues where there is little common ground (Trident) but the campaigns run by Labour for the last generation have all been about being a little bit nicer than the Conservatives, while remaining in the pocket of the financial interests in the City of London.

Once the banksters blew up the world, that whole “Fellating banksters while not being quite so awful as the Conservatives,” schtick has gotten old.

It has the additional advantage of jamming up the “New Labour” pukes, because any resurgence of the party’s fortunes has to involve Scotland, and the right wing of the party has now been forced to put themselves into an even deeper hole.

It’s actually a pretty savvy move.

Quote of the Day

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What we have seen take place is nothing less than a feral and unhinged scream from the swamp of reaction that resides in our culture, where every crank with a computer resides, consumed with bitterness and untreated angst, much of it in the form of self loathing over their own inadequacies and lack of talent – not to mention in some cases a jump from the extreme left to extreme right of the political spectrum, with all the psychological dysfunction such a metamorphosis describes.

—John Wight at Counterpunch on observing the torrent of abuse that Seumas Milne has endured since become Jeremy Corbyn’s communications chief

Seriously, the public freak-out over Labour being run by a guy who is ……… Labor ……… is kind of a major mindf%$#.

This Is a Feature, Not a Bug

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According to recently leaked documents, it appears that the TTIP will not contain meaningful environmental standards:

The EU appears to have broken a promise to reinforce environmental protections in a leaked draft negotiating text submitted in the latest round of TTIP talks in Miami.

In January, the bloc promised to safeguard green laws, defend international standards and protect the EU’s right to set high levels of environmental protection, in a haggle with the US over terms for a free trade deal.

But a confidential text seen by the Guardian and filed in the sustainable development chapter of negotiations earlier this week contains only vaguely phrased and non-binding commitments to environmental safeguards.

No obligations to ratify international environmental conventions are proposed, and ways of enforcing goals on biodiversity, chemicals and the illegal wildlife trade are similarly absent.

The document does recognise a “right of each party to determine its sustainable development policies and priorities”. But lawyers say this will have far weaker standing than provisions allowing investors to sue states that pass laws breaching legitimate expectations of profit.

“The safeguards provided to sustainable development are virtually non-existent compared to those provided to investors and the difference is rather stark,” said Tim Grabiel, a Paris-based environmental attorney. “The sustainable development chapter comprises a series of aspirational statements and loosely worded commitments with an unclear dispute settlement mechanism. It has little if any legal force.”

………

US officials maintain that few such cases are ever likely to be brought under the TTIP, which could wipe away tariffs in the world’s largest ever free trade deal.

However, environmental cases accounted for 60% of the 127 ISDS cases already brought against EU countries under bilateral trade agreements in the last two decades, according to Friends of the Earth Europe. Europe’s taxpayers paid out at least $3.5bn to private investors as a result.

Natacha Cingotti, a trade campaigner for the group, said that only a carve-out of environmental protections from the tribunal process could prevent such cases mushrooming after a TTIP deal.

“This new leak illustrates that the European commission is not serious about protecting essential safeguards for citizens and the environment in the context of the TTIP talks,” she told the Guardian. “Powerful corporate polluters are likely to get VIP treatment under it, while the only chapter that could bring strong language to protect essential regulations to build a sustainable future is weak and unenforceable.”

This is what always happens, because the goal of all of these deals has been to encourage a race to the bottom in terms of labor and environmental standards while making sure that the interests of parasitic financial interests are protected at all costs.

This has always been what drives these deals.

I’D Say, “Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen,” but There Is No Such Thing as a British Citizen

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Technically, they are all British subjects of the crown, not citizens, and now it looks like the Tories will be seizing the children of parents with unacceptable thoughts:

If there are two edicts I try to follow whenever I’m writing, they are, first, write what is true and, second, avoid cliche at all costs. I bring that up only as a preface before saying the following: the UK is walking down an Orwellian path. It’s nearly the cliche of cliches to say something like this, and yet it happens that the cliche is true. While there is most certainly a real thing known as a threat from Islamic terrorism, there is also such a thing as overreaction. What started as the British government’s attempt to ban extremist thought from social media and television (under the notion that some thoughts are too dangerous to enjoy the freedom that other thoughts deserve) then devolved into the conscripting of teachers that were to be on the lookout for children that might become radicalized. To assist them with this, the government helpfully provided spy-software to use against students. Spy-software which itself was found to be exploitable in the most laughably easy of ways. This employed two of the most horrifying aspects of Orwell’s Oceania: the concept of thought-crime and the employ of citizens to fearfully surveil one another.

And now it seems the UK is going even further, adopting Oceania’s reputation for the swallowing up of citizens should they be found suspect of thought-crime by those watchful citizens. Specifically, the Family Division of the Judiciary has put out a memo declaring exactly how it will remove children from the homes of anyone it suspects might radicalize those children. Here’s a snippet.
Recent months have seen increasing numbers of children cases coming before the Family Division and the Family Court where there are allegations or suspicions: that children, with their parents or on their own, are planning or attempting or being groomed with a view to travel to parts of Syria controlled by the so-called Islamic State; that children have been or are at risk of being radicalised; or that children have been or at are at risk of being involved in terrorist activities either in this country or abroad.

Only a local authority can start care proceedings (see section 31(1) of the Children Act 1989 – the police powers are set out in section 46). However, any person with a proper interest in the welfare of a child can start proceedings under the inherent jurisdiction or apply to make a child a ward of court.2 Usually, in cases falling within the description in paragraph 1 above, it will be the local authority which starts proceedings under the inherent jurisdiction or applies to make a child a ward of court, and the court would not expect the police (who have other priorities and responsibilities) to do so. There is, however, no reason why in a case where it seems to the police to be necessary to do so, the police should not start such proceedings for the purposes, for example, of making a child a ward of court, obtaining an injunction to prevent the child travelling abroad, obtaining a passport order, or obtaining a Tipstaff location or collection order. Given the complexities of these cases, I have decided that, for the time being at least, all cases falling within the description in paragraph 1 above are to be heard by High Court Judges of the Family Division.

In other words, the High Court Judges within the Family Division are now tasked with determining whether children will be made wards of the state based solely on suspicions of possible radicalization. Children torn from mothers and fathers in Muslim homes will be subject to the whims and inherently flawed watch of the larger citizenry. A citizenry, mind you, that has had its vigilance unduly ramped up by the government’s past actions and requests. It’s hard to imagine a better recipe for the unfair targeting of Muslim families than this. Unfortunately for all concerned, this same memo imagined just such a recipe, making things even worse.

The UK is beginning to resemble the movie “V”, and a that the local media seems transfixed and appalled by the fact Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t hate poor people for being poor.

There are worse things than having Donald Trump leading the polls, and David Cameron and his evil minions™ is one of them.