The Charge of the Light Brexit Brigade | 41 comments (41 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)

Re: The Charge of the Light Brexit Brigade (4.00 / 2)

Maybe, but also consider that there may be latent Remain support that could come out if an assertive anti-Brexit program were tabled. Bernie Sanders in the US broke all the "centralist moderate" norms and got a lot of support.

If the choice is between Conservative Brexit and Labour Brexit, why even bother to vote?

by asdf on Wed Dec 26th, 2018 at 02:39:28 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Charge of the Light Brexit Brigade (4.00 / 3)

I don't think that Sanders comparisons need to apply. Talking about how awful Brexit is is as "centrist moderate" as can be. The problem Remain faced was that their most visible spokespeople are utter twats and that there was no actual Brexit to oppose. Now with May's document there is at finally something to oppose, but the ghost of Lexit is still haunting the Labour HQ.

by generic on Wed Dec 26th, 2018 at 05:36:34 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Charge of the Light Brexit Brigade (4.00 / 3)

As Ian Dunt has demonstrated there is nothing in the Corbyn election manifesto which falls foul of EU rules. So you can be anything from a Corbynista to a neo-liberal and find little that is objectionable in the Treaties. The problem is that UK governments have been terrible at exploiting the scope those treaties allow, and has tended to use them as an excuse not to do stuff they didn't want to do anyway.

The only people with a real political problem with the EU are the Troskyist/Stalinist leftist fringe and the hard nationalist right. Everyone else who is anti-EU has been duped into believing that the EU is opposed to their brand of politics when in fact the EU has no difficulty in accomodating a very wide range of political policies and traditions indeed.

It is not the EU's fault that national electorates have been drifting ever further right and putting great strain on the social democratic foundations of the EU.

Index of Frank's Diaries

by Frank Schnittger (mail Frankschnittger at hot male dotty communists) on Wed Dec 26th, 2018 at 09:43:48 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Charge of the Light Brexit Brigade (4.00 / 2)

It is not the EU's fault that national electorates have been drifting ever further right

No it's not the EU's fault, it's the ECB's, but people are conflating the two.

Understandably... There's some guilt-by-association.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Thu Dec 27th, 2018 at 05:40:57 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Charge of the Light Brexit Brigade (none / 1)

The ECB is constituted as it is because Europeans elect right wingers.

by Colman (colman at eurotrib.com) on Thu Dec 27th, 2018 at 08:36:41 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Charge of the Light Brexit Brigade (3.00 / 3)

The problem is that even when Europeans think they have elected left wingers they turn out to be functionally right wingers (with the honorable exception of Greece, which is why it was necessary to punish them so severely)

It used to be only central Europeans who saw no distinction between left and right. Now it's the whole bloody continent.

(Probably overstating the case, but Italy and France are the latest victims)

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue
- Queen Elizabeth II}

by eurogreen on Fri Dec 28th, 2018 at 11:20:01 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Charge of the Light Brexit Brigade (none / 0)

Isn't Le Pen against the big banks as well as immigrants?
The old L-R polarity just doesn't stand the test any more.
Even more so the concept of what centre-anything means!
The Overton window has slid right out of the wall.
Get 'em by the semantics and the rest will follow'.
I am far from happy about the power Salvini has garnered piggybacking on the MV5*'s electoral victory, but this budget, though far from perfect, does more to make the very poor slightly better off than any has in decades.
It is distributive, which is why Brussels bashed it so.
The chances it will bring economic growth are still slim to none, but neither did austerity so something new deserves to be tried.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Sat Dec 29th, 2018 at 02:13:11 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Charge of the Light Brexit Brigade (4.00 / 2)

... there is nothing in the Corbyn election manifesto which falls foul of EU rules. So you can be anything from a Corbynista to a neo-liberal and find little that is objectionable in the Treaties.

George Peretz QC has a related analysis in the Guardian today.

Four reasons Jeremy Corbyn is dead wrong about EU state aid

I was struck by his comment

The real problem is not the state aid rules but the UK's own policy. The UK gives much less state aid per head than most EU countries, under-using the scope that it has within the state aid rules to support (for example) industrial training and regional development. And though Lexiters complain that the state aid rules could be an obstacle to a Labour government, in my experience they never get beyond abstractions about the "neoliberal" nature of those rules to actually set out the policies that a Labour government may want to implement that would not be permitted.

by oldremainmer48 on Thu Dec 27th, 2018 at 06:18:29 PM EST
[ Parent ]

The Charge of the Light Brexit Brigade | 41 comments (41 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

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