Sunday 3 January 2021

We are on a very slippery slope

I note Dr North has joined many Brexit advocates in denouncing Johnson's Trade and Cooperation Agreement, ending his post yesterday by turning Hague's mantra around and claiming we will be not in Europe but ruled by Europe. In doing so he will be backing up professor Chalmers of Singapore University who suggested much the same thing in a recent article.  Chalmers talked of British sovereignty run by Europe.

In The Conservative Woman (even further to the right than Conservative Home) Adrian Hill asks if Boris Johnson has "let Europe take us to the cleaners."

I suspect we will get a lot of this over the coming years. Johnson will become just another Tory PM who went to Brussels and came back without any clothes. Sooner or later, some ERG types will be pointing it out.

Dr North criticises as if he was entirely innocent and also as if it didn't matter. He's almost casual about it. After spending half a lifetime trying to get the UK out of the EU, he seems to accept that Britain has lost control and will essentially be a vassal state of the EU - which is what his opponents said would happen. Is he happy?  Apparently so.

The Brexit spin machine, far from slowing down on December 31st has now slipped into higher gear with claims that we have now banned electric pulse fishing and removed the 5 per cent tax from women's sanitary products. This being the result of being 'freed' from Brussels.  France banned pulse fishing in 2019 and George Osborne negotiated the 5 per cent VAT cut in 2016 but it was never implemented.

This didn't prevent the Tory party becoming a sort of ministry of truth with this tweet:

It is an official lie put out by the governing party. France outlawed pulse fishing in August 2019 as reported HERE.  Although the claim is simply NOT true, many people will think it is.

The fact that the 'benefits' of Brexit are having to be scraped off the bottom of the barrel is an indication of just how ridiculously expensive a fiasco it is going to be.  The added bureaucracy in completing customs declarations alone costing £7 billion, according to HMRC and the wider hit to trade knocking £100 billion a year off our GDP by 2030.  All for the 'benefit' of living in an ideocracy, being governed by idiots and liars.

But more worryingly is how we are on the road to tyranny.  It is only a few short steps from telling a small unimportant lie to excusing yourself for telling bigger ones that enable the ruling party to remain in power. In fact the more politicians realise the public - or a big enough percentage - can be fooled, the more they despise us and the bigger the lies become.  It is Orwellian.

On this topic. I see a man named Peter Gumbel has written an account in the New York Times of what he thinks Britain is becoming. Hs grandparents fled Germany in 1939 and came to Britain to find sanctuary from the Nazis. He says they would be shocked at what this country has become - as I am.

Gumbel writes about the 'role reversal' between Britain and Germany:

"Today, it is Germany that opens its door to refugees and whose chancellor, Angela Merkel, is outspoken in defense of global values and embodies decency and respect. By contrast, the Britain that sheltered and nurtured my family is a sad shadow of its former self.

"After 80 years, I feel ready to close a cycle of history. British by birth, I am European by heritage and conviction — and now have an unambiguously European nationality to prove it. I am still proud to be British, but I am also proud to be German. I think my grandparents and parents would approve."

Matthew Goodwin, Professor of Politics at the University of Kent and co-author of UKIP: Inside the Campaign to Redraw the Map of British Politics is a Brexit supporter often found writing in Conservative Home. In response to the Gumbel article he tweeted:

The NYT article is an opinion piece and it's hard to see any factual errors at all. It's one man's view of what we have become yet Goodwin, a professor, dismisses it out of hand.

He was roundly condemned but pushed back with more tweets later on, including this one:

When academics become useful idiots and start to defend the indefensible, it's time to start worrying. One can easily imagine this sort of thing happening in Germany in the late 1920s or early 1930s before it all got out of hand. 

We are on a dangerously slippy slope.

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