Category Archives: United Kingdom

Politicians to blame for rise of ‘respectable racism’ in Britain, says Lady Warsi

The Guardian reports: Politicians have allowed xenophobia, Islamophobia and antisemitism to enter the mainstream as a result of their toxic and divisive campaigning, according to Lady Warsi.

The Conservative peer and former party co-chair told the Guardian she was deeply worried about the current political climate, claiming a surge in “respectable racism” was feeding the far right.

“I was still disgusted but more comfortable with the racism of the 70s and 80s that was overt and thuggish, than this new form of respectable xenophobia where it is done in political circles, journalism and academia,” she said.

Warsi argued that the EU referendum and London mayoralty campaigns had helped create a climate in which people feel it is acceptable to tell long-established British communities “it’s time for you to leave”. [Continue reading…]

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These Brexiters will grind our environment into the dust

George Monbiot writes: The more urgent the environmental crisis becomes, the less we hear about it. It exposes the economic policies of all major parties – whether neoliberal or Keynesian – as incompatible with the times in which we live. To remark on what we are doing to the living planet is to fall into cognitive dissonance. It is easier to ignore it.

This is the spirit in which our new prime minister has engaged with our greatest predicament. Climate change clashes with the economic model, so let’s scrub it from the departmental register. Wildlife is collapsing and, at current rates of soil erosion, Britain has just 100 harvests left. So let’s appoint an extreme neoliberal fiercely opposed to constraints on industry as secretary of state for the environment. When the model is wrong, adjust the real world to make it fit.

I do not see the European Union as a lost Avalon. It brought us much that is good, such as directives that enable us to hold our governments to account for their environmental failures. But the good things it has done for the living world are counteracted – perhaps much more than counteracted – by a few astonishing idiocies. They arise from remote, unresponsive authority that is accessible to corporate lobby groups but not to mere mortals. In some respects the Brexit campaigners were right – though generally for the wrong reasons. [Continue reading…]

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Boris Johnson says Assad must go if Syrians’ suffering is to end

The Guardian reports: Boris Johnson has said Bashar al-Assad cannot remain in power in Syria as he prepares for his first talks as the British foreign secretary on Tuesday with his US counterpart, John Kerry.

Johnson, who had previously argued Assad could help defeat the Islamic State (Isis) in Syria, made the statement within days of being appointed the UK’s top diplomat by its new prime minister, Theresa May.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph in December, Johnson, then mayor of London, said the west could not afford to be picky in its choice of allies since Isis in Syria could not be defeated without terrestrial forces.

“We need someone to provide the boots on the ground; and given that we are not going to be providing British ground forces – and the French and the Americans are just as reluctant – we cannot afford to be picky about our allies,” he wrote.

“We have the estimated 70,000 of the Free Syrian Army (and many other groups and grouplets); but those numbers may be exaggerated, and they may include some jihadists who are not ideologically very different from al-Qaida.

“Who else is there? The answer is obvious. There is Assad, and his army; and the recent signs are that they are making some progress. Thanks at least partly to Russian airstrikes, it looks as if the regime is taking back large parts of Homs. Al-Qaida-affiliated militants are withdrawing from some districts of the city. Is that a bad thing? I don’t think so.”

In a statement before Tuesday’s talks, Johnson said: “I will be making clear my view that the suffering of the Syrian people will not end while Assad remains in power. The international community, including Russia, must be united on this.”

The official Foreign Office view is that Assad can stay only for a short period as part of a transitional government. [Continue reading…]

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IMF says Brexit has ‘thrown a spanner in the works’ of global recovery

The Guardian reports: The International Monetary Fund has slashed its forecast for UK growth next year after warning that the decision to leave the EU has damaged the British economy’s short-term prospects and “thrown a spanner in the works” of the global recovery.

The IMF, which voiced strong misgivings about a vote for Brexit in the runup to the EU referendum, said it expected the UK economy to grow by 1.3% in 2017, 0.9 points lower than a previous estimate made in its April world economic outlook (WEO).

The fund said it had cut its forecasts for the global economy due to the likely knock-on effect of the vote on other countries, particularly in Europe. [Continue reading…]

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The EU must move closer to reality

Vernon Bogdanor writes: ow should Britain leave the European Union? The question hangs over Theresa May’s new administration as it considers when to invoke article 50, which will lay out the procedure for a withdrawal agreement, and indicate what sort of future relationship Britain wants with the EU.

Will it be membership of the European Economic Area, like Norway? A trade agreement with the EU, or reliance on World Trade Organisation rules? Yet the future relationship depends not only on the conditions in Britain but also on developments in the EU. And in that respect there are encouraging signs that European leaders are, at long last, listening to what their peoples have been telling them.

As Donald Tusk, president of the European council, declared before the referendum, the EU needs to take a “long hard look at itself and listen to the British warning signal”. After the vote for Brexit, that is needed more than ever. During the campaign much was made of the dangers of an overweening Europe, aiming to become a federal superstate. Yet things have changed following the eurozone and migration crises.

Despite the rhetoric of ever closer union, the member states are no longer prepared to sacrifice more of their sovereignty. Germany has no appetite for fiscal union, and Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister, has said that integration has gone “too far”. Poland has no wish to adopt the euro; there is clearly little desire for a common migration policy; and anti-EU feeling is growing throughout the continent. The EU has become economically, politically and culturally too diverse for any drive towards ever closer union to be successful. [Continue reading…]

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Ireland could see ‘reunification referendum’ says opposition leader

Press Association reports: The leader of Ireland’s main opposition party said he hopes Brexit will move Ireland closer to reunification.

Micheál Martin said a reunification referendum should be called if it becomes clear a majority want to see an end to Irish partition over the UK decision to leave the EU.

The Fianna Fáil leader added that Northern Ireland’s 56% majority vote to remain within the bloc could be a defining moment for the region. He made his remarks delivering the annual John Hume lecture at the MacGill Summer School in Glenties, Co Donegal.

“It may very well be that the decision of Northern Ireland to oppose the English-driven anti-EU UK majority is a defining moment in Northern politics,” he said.

“The remain vote may show people the need to rethink current arrangements. I hope it moves us towards majority support for unification, and if it does we should trigger a reunification referendum.

“However, at this moment the only evidence we have is that the majority of people in Northern Ireland want to maintain open borders and a single market with this jurisdiction, and beyond that with the rest of Europe.” [Continue reading…]

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‘UK approach’ to Brexit will allow Scotland to determine when Article 50 gets invoked

The possibility of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU leading to the demise of the UK, is reminiscent of the case in which the doctor comes out of the operating theater and says, “the surgery was successful but unfortunately the patient died.”

The EU referendum question — “Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?” — had a false simplicity because it didn’t address the issue of the UK’s ability to remain intact outside the EU.

For this reason, Britain’s new prime minister, Theresa May, is adopting a “UK approach” to Brexit which takes the UK’s continued existence as a requirement in the unfolding political process.

 

The Telegraph reports: Theresa May has indicated that Brexit could be delayed as she said she will not trigger the formal process for leaving the EU until there is an agreed “UK approach” backed by Scotland.

The Prime Minister on Friday travelled to Scotland to meet Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister, and discuss plans for Britain’s Brexit negotiation.

In a sign that the new Prime Minister is committed to keeping the Union intact, she said she will not trigger Article 50 – the formal process for withdrawing from the EU – until all the devolved nations in the country agree.

Her comments could prompt anger from EU leaders, who want Mrs May to trigger Article 50 as soon as possible.

Speaking in Edinburgh, Mrs May said: “I have already said that I won’t be triggering Article 50 until I think that we have a U.K. approach and objectives for negotiations. I think it is important that we establish that before we trigger Article 50.”

Ms Sturgeon has promised to explore every option to keep Scotland in the EU, and has repeatedly warned that if that is not possible as part of the UK, it is “highly likely” to lead to a second independence vote. [Continue reading…]

In the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence, the strongest argument that was made against independence was that it would only be by remaining part of the UK that Scotland could ensure its continuing membership of the EU. Both in 2014 and now, the Scottish people have shown that whatever Scotland’s relationship with the rest of the UK might end up being, Scotland’s overriding priority is to remain in the EU.

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Climate change department shut down by Theresa May in ‘plain stupid’ and ‘deeply worrying’ move

The Independent reports: The decision to abolish the Department for Energy and Climate Change has been variously condemned as “plain stupid”, “deeply worrying” and “terrible” by politicians, campaigners and experts.

One of Theresa May’s first acts as Prime Minister was to move responsibility for climate change to a new Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy.

Only on Monday, Government advisers had warned of the need to take urgent action to prepare the UK for floods, droughts, heatwaves and food shortages caused by climate change.

The news came after the appointment of Andrea Leadsom – who revealed her first question to officials when she became Energy Minister last year was “Is climate change real? – was appointed as the new Environment Secretary.

And, after former Energy and Climate Change Secretary Amber Rudd announced in November that Britain was going to “close coal” by 2025, Ms Leadsom later asked the coal industry to help define what this actually meant.

Former Labour leader Ed Miliband tweeted: “DECC abolition just plain stupid. Climate not even mentioned in new deptartment title. Matters because departments shape priorities, shape outcomes.” [Continue reading…]

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Bernard-Henri Lévy: ‘Europe without the British spirit cannot be Europe’

Richard Williams interviews the French philosopher, Bernard-Henri Lévy: The outcome of the Brexit vote, not surprisingly, upset him. “For me, all my life, England has been really an example, a model. In dark times, this country has so often had the good reflex. I never saw in my lifetime, and I don’t find in my memory, a circumstance in which this country has gone through such a disaster with open eyes and such a popular fervour, left and right united in the same dishonour, nobody wanting to take the responsibility of going out. This is incredible. What’s sad is that England has added a little chapter to the history of the shameful comedy of bad politics.”

The referendum, he says, should never have been called. “A referendum is really the last option. It should not be a regular form of government. There is a great mistake in taking the option of referendum for personal reasons, for domestic reasons, in order to improve a career and so on. And when the destiny of a country is at stake, the destiny of a continent, it’s such a risk to play that with a tiny majority.

“You ask the people for a reply to a question. But democracy is not only a reply to a question. Democracy is first to shape the question, number two to reply, and number three to adapt to the reply with some laws and decrees and so on. Democracy means all three: to raise, to reply and to apply. A referendum is only number two, without the raising of the question and the application. So, even in the most traditional terms of political philosophy, you cannot say that a referendum is the embodiment of democracy. Not: ‘Are you for Europe or not for Europe?’ A question in democratic terms is something more sophisticated. Which can be the product of the will of the people, but not like this” – he snaps his fingers – “on one Thursday.”

And will the consequence of the British withdrawal be to solidify Europe, or to atomise it? “I don’t know. First of all, it is atomising the United Kingdom. Mr Cameron, Mr Boris Johnson and Mr Farage made a big achievement – they took the risk of destroying a great 60-year-old institution, and the many-centuries-old political whole that is the United Kingdom. This is the situation. And Europe without the UK, without the British spirit, cannot be Europe. It will be a huge loss of being, a loss of substance.” [Continue reading…]

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Boris Johnson and diplomacy are not synonymous

Patrick Wintour writes: Boris Johnson’s surprise appointment as foreign secretary is as much about the dismemberment of the foreign office as the sudden resurrection of the Conservative party’s favourite loveable rogue. It is also the first confirmation that Theresa May is going to be prepared to take risks in government.

For diplomacy and Boris Johnson are not, after all, exactly synonymous. Any cursory reading of his regular Daily Telegraph columns reveals praise of Vladimir Putin, calls to accommodate Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, and indiscretions about the president of the United States. The Germans have previously singled out Johnson for causing Brexit with “a diet of lies”.

So even though Johnson had played a dominant role in the leave campaign, few thought May would regard it as politically necessary to bring him back into the fold. He may remain hugely popular in the Tory constituencies and large parts of the country but he was always assumed to be too big a risk and someone who might outshine the comparatively dour prime minister.

Margaret Thatcher for instance tended to favour the duller end of the foreign secretaryship, choosing figures such as Geoffrey Howe, Francis Pym or Douglas Hurd.

But the foreign secretaryship may not turn out to be one of the great offices of state in a May government. Much of the heavy lifting on Brexit is going to be taken up by a new Brexit department, and to be conducted by David Davis, a former shadow home secretary and Europe minister in the Major government. Davis had no role in the Cameron government and was untrusted by the Cameron team, but now faces one of the toughest jobs in government. It will be his task to disentangle the UK from the European Union, including when to trigger article 50. Johnson – who has in the past likened the EU to ill-fitting underwear – will be kept away. [Continue reading…]

Polly Toynbee writes: The Boris shock appointment looks strangely out of kilter with May’s “safe pair of hands”. It may please her to see appalled faces in the Foreign Office, but this feels like an isolationist insult to the world. His first global tour will need to be on his knees.

How will the “special relationship” fare when he meets Hillary Clinton, whom he calls “a sadistic nurse”? Or the touchy, but geopolitically pivotal, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, about whom he has only just written an obscene limerick rhyming Ankara with wankerer. Funny? Not so much in a foreign secretary.

Racist pro-colonial “jokes” will precede him wherever he goes – “piccaninnies” and “natives” with “watermelon” smiles – a whole back catalogue of deliberate offence.

Those who feel ashamed already at how the world sees our xenophobic referendum will have a lot more to blush about as Boris brags and blusters his self-obsessed way through diplomatic etiquette. The Middle East? He praises Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. Europe? He compared the EU to Hitler. This man, unconnected to notions of truth, is in charge of MI6. What kind of negotiator will he be on anything sensitive (and everything is)?

Maybe May hopes he’ll crash and burn, but he can do great damage wherever he goes. The joke will be on us, for letting him treat the rest of the world as his playground. [Continue reading…]

 

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What’s the best Brexit Theresa May could get for Britain?

Patrick Wintour writes: Theresa May’s mantra “Brexit means Brexit” is designed to reassure. Suspicious leavers are being told by their new prime minister that there will be no reversal, slippery evasions or procrastination on her watch.

In the referendum campaign she may have been a reluctant remainer, but the message – with Brexiters taking the three top foreign policy jobs in cabinet – is that she will now abide by the people’s instructions. In the best Thatcherite tradition there will be no turning back.

Yet “Brexit means Brexit” means next to nothing since there are so many ways for the UK to leave the European Union, and so many different kinds of new relationship with the EU on offer, each with their own balance of advantage and disadvantage. Indeed few made a more careful attempt to weigh those risks than May herself in a lengthy speech on 25 April.

May is a stickler for detail and doubtless will be alarmed by the absence of a coherent plan for Brexit in Whitehall. If preparation is a prerequisite for successful Brexit, the omens are poor. The official leave campaign, focused on victory and avoiding internal division, drew up only the flimsiest plan for what Brexit would look like, pointing vaguely at the exit door, but with little idea of what lay the other side. Foreign Office diplomats were instructed to draw up no contingency plans whatsoever, supposedly for fear they might leak. [Continue reading…]

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UK faces Brexit dilemma over Europol

The Wall Street Journal reports: The U.K. government will be cut off in May from Europol, the European Union police agency that runs the bloc’s databases on criminals and counterterrorism, unless it explicitly adopts a new EU law.

Britain’s decision to leave the EU in the June referendum could put new Prime Minister Theresa May in the awkward position of having to opt into a piece of EU legislation while preparing to untangle the country from its obligations under EU law.

The U.K.’s participation in Europol can continue beyond the spring only if the new government in London agrees to the agency’s new legal status, which comes into force on May 1, 2017.

The new Europol law, adopted by the European Parliament in May, will put the agency under the European Parliament’s scrutiny—a move the U.K. opposed when it was negotiated—and make it easier to set up specialized units to fight terrorism and organized crime.

A spokeswoman for the British government said no decision has yet been taken on Britain’s endorsement of the law, having been left for the consideration of Ms. May, the former home secretary. She added that London still has time to opt into the new Europol law before it comes into force.

“It would be odd for them to opt in while they’re negotiating Brexit, but luckily she’s been a minister of interior for the past six years, so she knows what’s at stake,” said one EU diplomat familiar with the discussions. [Continue reading…]

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Labour’s Luciana Berger receives death threats telling her to ‘watch her back’

The Guardian reports: Death threats have been made to Labour’s Luciana Berger, with one message allegedly telling her she is going to “get it like Jo Cox did”.

She has reportedly received a number of emails that are understood to have included an image of a kitchen knife, as well as warnings telling her: “You better watch your back Jewish scum.”

The MP for Liverpool Wavertree is believed to have contacted police after receiving the messages on Friday. In a statement Berger, who stood down as Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet minister for mental health, extended her gratitude to the police for their “swift action” in dealing with the abuse. “Behaviour like this seeks to threaten our democracy. Intimidation of any kind should never be tolerated,” she said. [Continue reading…]

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Theresa May promises ‘union of all citizens’ in first speech as prime minister

The Guardian reports: Theresa May promised to fight “burning injustice” in British society, govern for the poor and marginalised, and create a union “between all of our citizens” in her first remarks as the UK’s prime minister.

Standing outside No 10 Downing Street after visiting the Queen in Buckingham Palace to “kiss hands” and be formally anointed as Britain’s second female prime minister, May made a bold grab for the political centre ground.

The former home secretary looked directly into the waiting television cameras, and said she would make decisions based on the interests of struggling families, not the rich.

“If you’re one of those families, if you’re just managing, I want to address you directly. I know you’re working around the clock. I know you’re doing your best. I know that sometimes life can be a struggle.

“The government I lead will be driven not by the interests of the privileged few, but by yours. We will do everything we can to give you more control over your lives,” she said.

“When we take the big calls, we’ll think not of the powerful, but you. When we pass new laws we’ll listen not to the mighty, but to you. When it comes to taxes we’ll prioritise not the wealthy but you.

“When it comes to opportunity we won’t entrench the advantages of the fortunate few. We will do everything we can to help anybody, whatever your background, to go as far as your talents will take you.”

May said she would follow in David Cameron’s footsteps as a “one nation” prime minister, but her emphasis on social injustice suggested a shift of tone. [Continue reading…]

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Theresa May calls for radical changes in British economic and business policy

Martin Kettle writes: Theresa May is sometimes described as remote. Yet few incoming prime ministers have flagged up their policy priorities more clearly than May did this week. Her contest of ideas with the Thatcherite Tory leadership candidate Andrea Leadsom lasted barely an hour – from the moment May stood up to deliver her keynote speech in Birmingham on Monday morning to Leadsom’s resignation announcement at noon.

But an hour was time enough for May to reveal a hugely ambitious agenda that she very deliberately described as “a different kind of Conservatism” and “a break with the past”. And the past from which the new prime minister proposes to break is not the distant past but the recent past, when David Cameron and George Osborne set the country’s course in ways of which May revealed herself this week to be a substantial critic, in a speech whose theme was pointedly “an economy that works for everyone”.

May’s Birmingham speech was supposed to be the first of several. Now it will have to stand alone as the principal signpost to what a May government intends to do. Brexit is naturally front and centre of that. But the meat of the speech was about economic and business policy. And it set the bar for radical change extremely high, drawing on ideas more associated with Ed Miliband than George Osborne, and owing more to German business models than British ones.

Her proposals were full of echoes from the pre-Thatcher era of the 1960s and 1970s, when May herself was growing up: industrial strategy, government action to defend important UK sectors such as pharmaceuticals, and a regional strategy involving all regions not just some. But the most important test that May set herself was in business strategy, where she pointed her guns at laissez faire corporate governance and business culture in a way that no Thatcherite like Leadsom would do in 100 years.

May spelled out a succession of targets: bosses who are “drawn from the same narrow social and professional circles” as one another; a pay gap between the executive elite and the workforce that is “irrational, unhealthy and growing”; and cartels in highly consolidated markets such as energy.

Her solutions ranged from consumer and employee representation on company boards, to encouragement of mutuals in the public services, to binding shareholder votes on executive pay, and full transparency on bonus targets and pay multiples. There was also a more familiar injunction, very well expressed, on the moral case for taxation – “a duty to put something back … a debt to your fellow citizens … a responsibility to pay your taxes.”

The standout proposal here is employee representation on boards. May sounded genuinely serious. “If we are going to have an economy that works for everyone, we are going to need to give people more control of their lives. And that means cutting out all the political platitudes about ‘stakeholder societies’ and doing something radical.” [Continue reading…]

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Welcome to the era of post-truth politics and journalism

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Katharine Viner writes: One Monday morning last September, Britain woke to a depraved news story. The prime minister, David Cameron, had committed an “obscene act with a dead pig’s head”, according to the Daily Mail. “A distinguished Oxford contemporary claims Cameron once took part in an outrageous initiation ceremony at a Piers Gaveston event, involving a dead pig,” the paper reported. Piers Gaveston is the name of a riotous Oxford university dining society; the authors of the story claimed their source was an MP, who said he had seen photographic evidence: “His extraordinary suggestion is that the future PM inserted a private part of his anatomy into the animal.”

The story, extracted from a new biography of Cameron, sparked an immediate furore. It was gross, it was a great opportunity to humiliate an elitist prime minister, and many felt it rang true for a former member of the notorious Bullingdon Club. Within minutes, #Piggate and #Hameron were trending on Twitter, and even senior politicians joined the fun: Nicola Sturgeon said the allegations had “entertained the whole country”, while Paddy Ashdown joked that Cameron was “hogging the headlines”. At first, the BBC refused to mention the allegations, and 10 Downing Street said it would not “dignify” the story with a response – but soon it was forced to issue a denial. And so a powerful man was sexually shamed, in a way that had nothing to do with his divisive politics, and in a way he could never really respond to. But who cares? He could take it.

Then, after a full day of online merriment, something shocking happened. Isabel Oakeshott, the Daily Mail journalist who had co-written the biography with Lord Ashcroft, a billionaire businessman, went on TV and admitted that she did not know whether her huge, scandalous scoop was even true. Pressed to provide evidence for the sensational claim, Oakeshott admitted she had none.

“We couldn’t get to the bottom of that source’s allegations,” she said on Channel 4 News. “So we merely reported the account that the source gave us … We don’t say whether we believe it to be true.” In other words, there was no evidence that the prime minister of the United Kingdom had once “inserted a private part of his anatomy” into the mouth of a dead pig – a story reported in dozens of newspapers and repeated in millions of tweets and Facebook updates, which many people presumably still believe to be true today.

Oakeshott went even further to absolve herself of any journalistic responsibility: “It’s up to other people to decide whether they give it any credibility or not,” she concluded. This was not, of course, the first time that outlandish claims were published on the basis of flimsy evidence, but this was an unusually brazen defence. It seemed that journalists were no longer required to believe their own stories to be true, nor, apparently, did they need to provide evidence. Instead it was up to the reader – who does not even know the identity of the source – to make up their own mind. But based on what? Gut instinct, intuition, mood?

Does the truth matter any more?

Nine months after Britain woke up giggling at Cameron’s hypothetical porcine intimacies, the country arose on the morning of 24 June to the very real sight of the prime minister standing outside Downing Street at 8am, announcing his own resignation.

“The British people have voted to leave the European Union and their will must be respected,” Cameron declared. “It was not a decision that was taken lightly, not least because so many things were said by so many different organisations about the significance of this decision. So there can be no doubt about the result.”

But what soon became clear was that almost everything was still in doubt. At the end of a campaign that dominated the news for months, it was suddenly obvious that the winning side had no plan for how or when the UK would leave the EU – while the deceptive claims that carried the leave campaign to victory suddenly crumbled. At 6.31am on Friday 24 June, just over an hour after the result of the EU referendum had become clear, Ukip leader Nigel Farage conceded that a post-Brexit UK would not in fact have £350m a week spare to spend on the NHS – a key claim of Brexiteers that was even emblazoned on the Vote Leave campaign bus. A few hours later, the Tory MEP Daniel Hannan stated that immigration was not likely to be reduced – another key claim.

It was hardly the first time that politicians had failed to deliver what they promised, but it might have been the first time they admitted on the morning after victory that the promises had been false all along. This was the first major vote in the era of post-truth politics: the listless remain campaign attempted to fight fantasy with facts, but quickly found that the currency of fact had been badly debased. [Continue reading…]

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Racism and xenophobia are resurgent in the UK, and the centre-left is partly to blame

David Wearing writes: “I’m not a racist, but…..”; “I haven’t got a racist bone in my body”; “it’s not racist to have concerns about immigration”. We’re all familiar with Britain’s broad repertoire of phrases for denying or downplaying prejudice. But with a fivefold increase in reported hate crimes since the Brexit vote, it is no longer tenable to sweep this issue under the carpet. We have to be honest. This country has a problem.

It is frequently said that, because a majority voted for Brexit, racism and xenophobia cannot be a significant part of the picture. This is consistent with the popular misconception that these forms of prejudice are restricted to the margins: a few far-right boot-boys, 1950s throwbacks and a handful of the socially maladjusted. It is a profoundly naïve assumption.

The proportion of people admitting racist views to pollsters is 29%, and given the social taboo around racism, the true number is likely to be higher (recall, for example, the UKIP councillor who said she had a problem with “negroes” because there was “something about their faces”, while simultaneously insisting that she was “not a racist”). A quarter of Britons say immigrants, including any British-born children, should be “encouraged” to leave the country – echoing the standard ‘send them back’ demand of the far right. A further 30% of those polled could not say that they definitely disagreed with that position. These figures are dismaying, but will only shock those who have never experienced racism, and the widespread complacency about it, for themselves. [Continue reading…]

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