Agreed, they both stood up for their beliefs against the establishment.
>Holding a vast pile of documentation given to him in despair by a road haulier, he complained that this was the kind of form-filling lorry drivers had to cope with to qualify for entry from Brexit Britain to Northern Ireland.
>
>The minister seemed blissfully unaware that the bundle of bumf he was displaying was the consequence of his own government’s Brexit policies.
I see Dominic Cummings is back on twitter with opinions 🧵
He seems to put a lot of stock in the idea it was a ‘once in a generation’ referendum, because it gives him the ‘I was just respecting democracy’ hand, a subtle variation of the ‘I was just following orders’ hand.
While insisting the the British public aren’t stupid, he seems to forget that a ‘once in a generation’ referendum wasn’t in the Conservative manifesto, neither did the Conservative party win to 2015 with Cameron saying that.
November 2015 is when David Cameron adopts that term in a speech.
If the British people had voted for someone making that case, that would be fine, but what we have here is the political class getting what they want, and then telling the people what they can have and when they can have it within a timeframe way beyond their mandate.
And I know that Dominic has a thing about Remainers calling Brexiteers thick, but the electorate in this country aren’t stupid as Dominic seems to imply.
People understood that this was neither a democratic statement, or a politically binding one.
Dominic Cummins certainly seemed to give this line the weight that it could command, because in 2016 he was arguing we needed to have a second negotiation with the EU.
The reality was that there are references to the possibility of a second referendum running all the way up to the 22nd of June.
The British public know the difference between a statement from a 5 year Prime Minister promising what will be available for 25 years, and claiming people’s rights will be protected by an international agreement that does not exist.
Not delivering on the first statement that nobody took that seriously, claims Dominic, would have been a dark day for democracy.
Lying to people about how their rights are safe when they will be automatically stripped?
A minor indiscretion, I assume.
His argument lives. not outside of the political bubble but in biting reality, but in the grasping of the deep and musty mire of political cliché.
He claims that the Remain campaign said “promised repeatedly they’d respect the result & no 2nd REF”, and while I don’t remember the first part being quite as regular as he claim, the second claim about a referendum is basically a referendum convention.
For a referendum to be considered successful there must be a high turnout, therefore politicians before a referendum, as a matter or routine, put emphasis on the idea that there will not be another one.
Again, the British public understood this. They are not as thick as Mr Cummings seems to think.
Also, what if Remain MPs had all said ‘continuously’ they would respect the vote? What does that mean in the context of the referendum?
Do we need to consider the 1975 one?
In the aftermath of the vote on 6th June 1975 Tony Benn made the eloquent statement:
“When the British people speak, everyone, including members of Parliament, should tremble before their decision and that’s certainly the spirit with which I accept the result of the referendum.”
Tony Benn launched his anti-Common Market campaign on November 24th, 1975 stating that debates do not end when decisions have been made.
If that is the timescale, consider how many Remainers voted for the Article 50 after a considerably longer time than Tony Benn’s period of “trembling”.
When the vote in principle in 1971 was held, Eurosceptic politicians lined up to say they would bring the government down before supporting the vote because it was against their principles.
Dominic may have worked around the likes of Boris Johnson for a long time, but it’s hard to imagine he discounted the idea that people would continue to live by their principles, rather than go silently into the night.
Principles are always going to stand up to the empty political ‘he said, she said’ arguments that Cummings tries to knock them down with.
And what of the unknown? Yvette Cooper said she didn’t know if there would be another referendum because she didn’t know what would happen. Lord Butler wrote an article suggesting that the process of withdrawal may be so awful that another referendum would follow.
I’m afraid, attempting to pin the lack of referendum in 2019 on Remainers will butter no parsnips.
It was the Leavers, remember, who during the passage of the referendum bill argued that the results may not last.
It was the Eurosceptics who also lined up to argue they would fight on. Dominic Raab even suggesting that the Conservative leadership contest in 2020 would be dominated by the push for a second referendum.
2020 was fine, but I guess December 2019 was just too soon…
Dominic can’t point to David Cameron and claim he ‘continually said there would be no referendum on the agreed deal’, because David Cameron did everything he could not to comment on what happens in a lose scenario.
And it was Dominic Cummings who wrote in 2015 “A NO vote really means that a new government team must negotiate a new deal with the EU and they will have to give us a vote on it’.
But Cummings now claims that he believed what ‘a NO vote really means’ in 2016 would get people killed.
How can this possibly be?
There was certainly no perceived contradiction in democracy when the leave campaign adopted this policy.
Maybe it has something to do with how leave politicians whipped up the more extreme element on their side with horror stories of what was happening to an entirely fictional version of democracy.
They called the backstop the ‘anti-democratic backstop’, but woe betide anyone propose that the undemocratic backstop be put to the undemocratic public for an undemocraitc referendum.
We even had Andrew Neil claim on twitter claiming that a leaflet from the government held such democratic force as to transcend the powers of parliament, change a bill retrospectively, and make any attempt to oppose it through an election an abomination to democracy itself.
I don’t deny that there were problems with holding a referendum at that point, but not because democracy had gone through a mid-life crisis since 2015 and had taken to drastic changed, but because leavers deliberately and cynically perverted the debate.
But that’s not all the only reason, because Dominic is the sort of person who believes “we both want what is best, we just had different views on how it is to be achieved” without any sense of just how much leavers believe in Brexit more than Remainers believe in the EU.
The leavers fanatical faith in national sovereignty over economic gravity only lends itself to the argument they went forward with the NIP because they BELIEVED Brexit would conquer all.
Dominic however presents the view that it was in the interest of keeping people’s faith in democracy, leavers had to attack every single democratic institution that got in their way of a political statement made by someone on the other side of the campaign.
And Mr Cummings wants us to believe, I assume, that those same democratic institutions under attack now are not revenge for affronting the greatness of Brexit, but a deep desire to uphold democratic values?
That the only thing to do in the face of a break down in our democracy in 2019 was to lie to the people about how great the deal was they had signed…It had to be done….They didn’t enjoy it, but it was the only way to ensure people’s faith in politicians…
“You don’t go around blurting difficult truths”, as I’m sure Dominic would say.
On one thing, Dominic is right.
We don’t agree, because I just see some people who lied to get something over the line, lied to to keep their support as they began to face those lies, and then lied about a deal to the electorate and then lied to themselves and to each other.
And it doesn’t matter how many Remainers Dominic points to in an attempt to detract from the fact he built his ivory tower on shifting sands, eventually everyone will realise that his tower has shifted right into the middle of the Irish Sea.
/End
–
> Of course the government blames the severe recrudescence of inflation, and the deleterious impact on people’s spending power of world events outside its control. However, as economist Adam Posen of the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics points out, the UK is particularly vulnerable to “external shocks”.
Brexit voters love to ignore this point. Brexit is not the sole cause of our problems but they have made us much more vulnerable to events such as COVID or the war in Ukraine now that we stand alone. The EU was not perfect but there were benefits to being in the single market and the increased stability was definitely one of them. With international relations becoming increasingly strained in recent years, being part of a large trading bloc would have made us much more resilient than we are now. We may have seen record growth compared to other G7 nations last year, however that was still not enough to repair the damage seen in 2020 as a result of Brexit. Those benefits we were promised seem set to be a very long time coming, yet those who voted for that will continue to blame anyone and everyone but themselves.
1) Elite schools full of traitorous ascendant fools
2) Security files which elitism sweeps aside
3) In Russia’s pocket
4) Long lasting damage to many others with few/no consequences to self
6 comments
Agreed, they both stood up for their beliefs against the establishment.
>Holding a vast pile of documentation given to him in despair by a road haulier, he complained that this was the kind of form-filling lorry drivers had to cope with to qualify for entry from Brexit Britain to Northern Ireland.
>
>The minister seemed blissfully unaware that the bundle of bumf he was displaying was the consequence of his own government’s Brexit policies.
–
Anyway, enough of Gary Larson’s [*Far Side*](https://www.thefarside.com/)
will though add this here:
>FT: [*From Partygate to Brexit, many of today’s political dramas can be traced back to the leading players’ student days — Simon Kuper*](https://www.ft.com/content/2fa1e436-a5c7-43b1-9e5a-b1e1b43b8c3a)
April 14 2022
>
>([🪞 link](https://archive.ph/lNaXT))
worth checking out for a few of the photos alone
Dropping this here
–
Steve Analyst (@EmporersNewC) [May 15, 2022 · 4:35 PM](https://nitter.net/EmporersNewC/status/1525862530295406592#m)
I see Dominic Cummings is back on twitter with opinions 🧵
He seems to put a lot of stock in the idea it was a ‘once in a generation’ referendum, because it gives him the ‘I was just respecting democracy’ hand, a subtle variation of the ‘I was just following orders’ hand.
While insisting the the British public aren’t stupid, he seems to forget that a ‘once in a generation’ referendum wasn’t in the Conservative manifesto, neither did the Conservative party win to 2015 with Cameron saying that.
November 2015 is when David Cameron adopts that term in a speech.
If the British people had voted for someone making that case, that would be fine, but what we have here is the political class getting what they want, and then telling the people what they can have and when they can have it within a timeframe way beyond their mandate.
And I know that Dominic has a thing about Remainers calling Brexiteers thick, but the electorate in this country aren’t stupid as Dominic seems to imply.
People understood that this was neither a democratic statement, or a politically binding one.
Dominic Cummins certainly seemed to give this line the weight that it could command, because in 2016 he was arguing we needed to have a second negotiation with the EU.
The reality was that there are references to the possibility of a second referendum running all the way up to the 22nd of June.
The British public know the difference between a statement from a 5 year Prime Minister promising what will be available for 25 years, and claiming people’s rights will be protected by an international agreement that does not exist.
Not delivering on the first statement that nobody took that seriously, claims Dominic, would have been a dark day for democracy.
Lying to people about how their rights are safe when they will be automatically stripped?
A minor indiscretion, I assume.
His argument lives. not outside of the political bubble but in biting reality, but in the grasping of the deep and musty mire of political cliché.
He claims that the Remain campaign said “promised repeatedly they’d respect the result & no 2nd REF”, and while I don’t remember the first part being quite as regular as he claim, the second claim about a referendum is basically a referendum convention.
For a referendum to be considered successful there must be a high turnout, therefore politicians before a referendum, as a matter or routine, put emphasis on the idea that there will not be another one.
Again, the British public understood this. They are not as thick as Mr Cummings seems to think.
Also, what if Remain MPs had all said ‘continuously’ they would respect the vote? What does that mean in the context of the referendum?
Do we need to consider the 1975 one?
In the aftermath of the vote on 6th June 1975 Tony Benn made the eloquent statement:
“When the British people speak, everyone, including members of Parliament, should tremble before their decision and that’s certainly the spirit with which I accept the result of the referendum.”
Tony Benn launched his anti-Common Market campaign on November 24th, 1975 stating that debates do not end when decisions have been made.
If that is the timescale, consider how many Remainers voted for the Article 50 after a considerably longer time than Tony Benn’s period of “trembling”.
When the vote in principle in 1971 was held, Eurosceptic politicians lined up to say they would bring the government down before supporting the vote because it was against their principles.
Dominic may have worked around the likes of Boris Johnson for a long time, but it’s hard to imagine he discounted the idea that people would continue to live by their principles, rather than go silently into the night.
Principles are always going to stand up to the empty political ‘he said, she said’ arguments that Cummings tries to knock them down with.
And what of the unknown? Yvette Cooper said she didn’t know if there would be another referendum because she didn’t know what would happen. Lord Butler wrote an article suggesting that the process of withdrawal may be so awful that another referendum would follow.
I’m afraid, attempting to pin the lack of referendum in 2019 on Remainers will butter no parsnips.
It was the Leavers, remember, who during the passage of the referendum bill argued that the results may not last.
It was the Eurosceptics who also lined up to argue they would fight on. Dominic Raab even suggesting that the Conservative leadership contest in 2020 would be dominated by the push for a second referendum.
2020 was fine, but I guess December 2019 was just too soon…
Dominic can’t point to David Cameron and claim he ‘continually said there would be no referendum on the agreed deal’, because David Cameron did everything he could not to comment on what happens in a lose scenario.
And it was Dominic Cummings who wrote in 2015 “A NO vote really means that a new government team must negotiate a new deal with the EU and they will have to give us a vote on it’.
But Cummings now claims that he believed what ‘a NO vote really means’ in 2016 would get people killed.
How can this possibly be?
There was certainly no perceived contradiction in democracy when the leave campaign adopted this policy.
Maybe it has something to do with how leave politicians whipped up the more extreme element on their side with horror stories of what was happening to an entirely fictional version of democracy.
Anti-democratic courts, anti-democratic parliaments, anti-democratic Remainers exercising their anti-democratic free speech
They called the backstop the ‘anti-democratic backstop’, but woe betide anyone propose that the undemocratic backstop be put to the undemocratic public for an undemocraitc referendum.
We even had Andrew Neil claim on twitter claiming that a leaflet from the government held such democratic force as to transcend the powers of parliament, change a bill retrospectively, and make any attempt to oppose it through an election an abomination to democracy itself.
I don’t deny that there were problems with holding a referendum at that point, but not because democracy had gone through a mid-life crisis since 2015 and had taken to drastic changed, but because leavers deliberately and cynically perverted the debate.
But that’s not all the only reason, because Dominic is the sort of person who believes “we both want what is best, we just had different views on how it is to be achieved” without any sense of just how much leavers believe in Brexit more than Remainers believe in the EU.
The leavers fanatical faith in national sovereignty over economic gravity only lends itself to the argument they went forward with the NIP because they BELIEVED Brexit would conquer all.
Dominic however presents the view that it was in the interest of keeping people’s faith in democracy, leavers had to attack every single democratic institution that got in their way of a political statement made by someone on the other side of the campaign.
And Mr Cummings wants us to believe, I assume, that those same democratic institutions under attack now are not revenge for affronting the greatness of Brexit, but a deep desire to uphold democratic values?
That the only thing to do in the face of a break down in our democracy in 2019 was to lie to the people about how great the deal was they had signed…It had to be done….They didn’t enjoy it, but it was the only way to ensure people’s faith in politicians…
“You don’t go around blurting difficult truths”, as I’m sure Dominic would say.
On one thing, Dominic is right.
We don’t agree, because I just see some people who lied to get something over the line, lied to to keep their support as they began to face those lies, and then lied about a deal to the electorate and then lied to themselves and to each other.
And it doesn’t matter how many Remainers Dominic points to in an attempt to detract from the fact he built his ivory tower on shifting sands, eventually everyone will realise that his tower has shifted right into the middle of the Irish Sea.
/End
–
> Of course the government blames the severe recrudescence of inflation, and the deleterious impact on people’s spending power of world events outside its control. However, as economist Adam Posen of the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics points out, the UK is particularly vulnerable to “external shocks”.
Brexit voters love to ignore this point. Brexit is not the sole cause of our problems but they have made us much more vulnerable to events such as COVID or the war in Ukraine now that we stand alone. The EU was not perfect but there were benefits to being in the single market and the increased stability was definitely one of them. With international relations becoming increasingly strained in recent years, being part of a large trading bloc would have made us much more resilient than we are now. We may have seen record growth compared to other G7 nations last year, however that was still not enough to repair the damage seen in 2020 as a result of Brexit. Those benefits we were promised seem set to be a very long time coming, yet those who voted for that will continue to blame anyone and everyone but themselves.
1) Elite schools full of traitorous ascendant fools
2) Security files which elitism sweeps aside
3) In Russia’s pocket
4) Long lasting damage to many others with few/no consequences to self
…friends of Dorothy?