The Guardian reports: The husband of Jo Cox plans to continue with a project that aims to build an international alliance to combat “the dangerous breeding ground” of economic insecurity on which the populist right has fed across European politics.
Brendan Cox has let it be known that he is determined to continue with the work in memory of his wife, who was killed on Thursday, but believes this will only succeed if lessons can be learned from why the right has so far taken the initiative on the migration issue.
In a paper he has circulated – and asked the Guardian to quote from – Cox argues that one of the problems is that those hostile to refugees are better organised, more focused on galvanising public opinion, and better at tapping into human emotions, including over wider economic insecurities.
Mainstream politicians, he writes, “in most cases are clueless on how to deal with the public debate. Petrified by the rise of the populists they try to neuter them by taking their ground and aping their rhetoric. Far from closing down the debates, these steps legitimise their views, reinforce their frames and pull the debate further to the extremes (Sarkozy and the continuing rise of Front National is a case in point).” [Continue reading…]
BBC Arabic social media producer Nader Ibrahim says: “Minutes after the sad news about Jo Cox was announced, Syrian activists took to social media to express their grief.
“This tweet by the white helmets, or the Syrian civil defence forces, is quite significant since they are literally on the ground operating inside.”
Ibrahim adds that the sadness expressed from people in Syria for a British MP is significant. He says: “It is quite surprising to see Syrians, from inside Syria, in a war-torn country, with limited access in a lot of its places to the outside world, tweeting and talking about a British MP who is half way across the world.
“This is especially because a lot of Syrians feel like they’ve been let down by the West and the international community for not taking enough action to stop the war in their country. So to see them mourning a western MP is quite a thing.” [Continue reading…]
Southern Poverty Law Center reports: According to records obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center Mair was a dedicated supporter of the National Alliance (NA), the once premier neo-Nazi organization in the United States, for decades. Mair purchased a manual from the NA in 1999 that included instructions on how to build a pistol.
Mair, who resides in what is described as a semi-detached house on the Fieldhead Estate in Birstall, sent just over $620 to the NA, according to invoices for goods purchased from National Vanguard Books, the NA’s printing imprint. Mair purchased subscriptions for periodicals published by the imprint and he bought works that instruct readers on the “Chemistry of Powder & Explosives,” “Incendiaries,” and a work called “Improvised Munitions Handbook.” Under “Section III, No. 9” (page 125) of that handbook, there are detailed instructions for constructing a “Pipe Pistol For .38 Caliber Ammunition” from components that can be purchased from nearly any hardware store.
The NA may be best-known for the work of its now-deceased founder, William Pierce, a former physics professor who also wrote racist novels. One, The Turner Diaries, tells the post-apocalyptic fictional story of a white man fighting in a race war that may have provided inspiration for Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. [Continue reading…]
Neal Ascherson writes: In less than a week, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland could be tearing up its European treaties and backing into Atlantic isolation.
The slogan “Take back control!” has been showing up everywhere in the last two weeks. It’s about sovereignty: the idea that unelected bureaucrats in Brussels, not the Westminster Parliament, make the laws of England. Above all, it means taking control of the country’s frontiers. This would break decisively with a sacred principle of the European Union: the free movement of people, which, for more than 20 years under the Schengen Agreement, has allowed Europeans to travel among member states without passport checks, and live and work in those countries with no visa requirements.
With fateful timing, the latest official figures for net migration to Britain, published at the end of May, showed the second-highest annual number on record, 333,000 in 2015; European Union nations accounted for more than half of that figure. This was far higher than government targets, and played directly into the Leave campaign’s refrain about “uncontrolled immigration.”
Is it a baseless panic? Many European countries tolerate far higher levels of immigration. Scotland, with a new community of some 55,000 Poles, actively encourages it. In England, support for Brexit and for the xenophobic U.K. Independence Party is often in inverse proportion to the scale of the problem: The fewer immigrants there are in a town, the louder the outcry against foreigners. In contrast, polling in inner London, where about four out of 10 inhabitants are now foreign-born, shows a clear preference for staying in Europe.
The English, normally skeptical about politics, have grown gullible. Both sides pelt the voters with forecasts of doom should the other side win. None are reliable, and the Leave figures have been especially deceitful. Remainers predict an economic armageddon of lost growth, a devalued pound and withered City of London. The Leavers’ Conservative leaders, assuming the mantle of a government in waiting, promise that “their” Britain could cover all the lost European subsidies and grants to farmers, poor regions, universities and schools. Evidence that they could find these additional billions is scant.
But there are deeper motives here than anxiety about the exchange rate or banks in London decamping to Frankfurt. Behind Brexit stalks the ghost of imperial exception, the feeling that Great Britain can never be just another nation to be outvoted by France or Slovakia. There’s still a providential feeling about Shakespeare’s “sceptred isle” as “this fortress built by Nature.” Or as an old Royal Marines veteran said to me, “God dug the bloody Channel for us, so why do we keep trying to fill it in?” [Continue reading…]
When you shout BREAKING POINT over and over again, you don’t get to be surprised when someone breaks. When you present politics as a matter of life and death, as a question of national survival, don’t be surprised if someone takes you at your word. You didn’t make them do it, no, but you didn’t do much to stop it either.
Sometimes rhetoric has consequences. If you spend days, weeks, months, years telling people they are under threat, that their country has been stolen from them, that they have been betrayed and sold down the river, that their birthright has been pilfered, that their problem is they’re too slow to realise any of this is happening, that their problem is they’re not sufficiently mad as hell, then at some point, in some place, something or someone is going to snap. And then something terrible is going to happen.
We can’t control the weather but, in politics, we can control the climate in which the weather happens. That’s on us, all of us, whatever side of any given argument we happen to be. Today, it feels like we’ve done something terrible to that climate.
Sad doesn’t begin to cover it. This is worse, much worse, than just sad. This is a day of infamy, a day in which we should all feel angry and ashamed. Because if you don’t feel a little ashamed – if you don’t feel sick, right now, wherever you are reading this – then something’s gone wrong with you somewhere. [Continue reading…]
Polly Toynbee writes: When politicians from a mainstream party use immigration as their main weapon in a hotly fought campaign, they unleash something dark and hateful that always lurks in all countries not far beneath the surface.
Did we delude ourselves we were a tolerant country – or can we still save our better selves? Over recent years, struggling to identify “Britishness”, to connect with a natural patriotic love of country that citizens have every right to feel, politicians floundering for a British identity reach for the reassuring idea that this cradle of democracy is blessed with some special civility.
But if the vote is out [of the EU], then out goes that impression of what kind of country we are. Around the world we will be seen as the island that cut itself off out of anti-foreigner feeling: that will identify us globally more than any other attribute. Our image, our reality, will change overnight.
Contempt for politics is dangerous and contagious, yet it has become a widespread default sneer. There was Jo Cox, a dedicated MP, going about her business doing what good MPs do, making herself available to any constituents with any problems to drop in to her surgery. Just why she became the victim of such a vicious attack, we may learn eventually. But in the aftermath of her death, there are truths of which we should remind ourselves right now.
Democracy is precious and precarious. It relies on a degree of respect for the opinions of others, soliciting support for political ideas without stirring up undue savagery and hatred against opponents. [Continue reading…]
Paul Golding, leader of the extreme rightwing Britain First, made a statement following the attack on Jo Cox (before her death had been reported), in which he said*:
The media, with an axe to grind, with a history of dishonest practice like the [News International] phone hacking scandal, they are trying to somehow incriminate a perfectly legal political party in this act of criminality. We had nothin’ to do with it. I was in the office stuffin’ envelopes this afternoon when this news broke. And we certainly don’t condone it. We hope that this person who carried it out is strung up by the neck on the nearest lamppost. That’s the way we view justice.
So, I urge the media: stop telling lies. Stop twisting things. Stick to the facts. The facts are that this was a terrible criminal act on an MP — a representative of the people. No one else — no organization — was behind this. No organization was incriminated. That’s the fact of the situation. So I urge the media to stick to facts.
Graeme Howard, 38, who lives in nearby Bond Street, said the attacker shouted “Britain first”, adding: “I heard the shot and I ran outside and saw some ladies from the cafe running out with towels. There was loads of screaming and shouting and the police officers showed up. He was shouting ‘Britain first’ when he was doing it and being arrested.”
Another witness, Clarke Rothwell, also told the BBC that Cox’s attacker shouted “Britain first”.
* Anyone who follows the link above to watch Golding make his statement and who is unfamiliar with the details of the London Mayoral election to which he refers and in which he was one of the candidates, might be interested to note that he is lying when he claims he received “over 100,000” votes. In fact he got 31,372 votes, which amounts to 1.2% of votes cast.
Jeremy Corbyn, leader of Britain’s Labour party has issued this tribute to Jo Cox:
The whole of the Labour party and Labour family – and indeed the whole country – will be in shock at the horrific murder of Jo Cox today.
Jo had a lifelong record of public service and a deep commitment to humanity. She worked both for Oxfam and the anti-slavery charity, the Freedom Fund, before she was elected last year as MP for Batley and Spen – where she was born and grew up.
Jo was dedicated to getting us to live up to our promises to support the developing world and strengthen human rights – and she brought those values and principles with her when she became an MP.
Jo died doing her public duty at the heart of our democracy, listening to and representing the people she was elected to serve. It is a profoundly important cause for us all.
Jo was universally liked at Westminster, not just by her Labour colleagues, but across Parliament.
In the coming days, there will be questions to answer about how and why she died. But for now all our thoughts are with Jo’s husband Brendan and their two young children. They will grow up without their mum, but can be immensely proud of what she did, what she achieved and what she stood for.
We send them our deepest condolences. We have lost a much loved colleague, a real talent and a dedicated campaigner for social justice and peace. But they have lost a wife and a mother, and our hearts go out to them.
The Guardian reported earlier: The Labour MP Jo Cox is in a critical condition after being shot and stabbed multiple times after a constituency meeting. [“Dee Collins, the chief constable of West Yorkshire police, announces that Jo Cox has died.” The Guardian.]
Armed officers responded to the attack near a library in Birstall, West Yorkshire, on Thursday afternoon. A 52-year-old man was arrested in the area, police confirmed. The suspect was named locally as Tommy Mair.
Police added that Cox, the MP for Batley and Spen, had suffered “serious injuries and is in a critical condition”. She has been taken by helicopter to Leeds General Infirmary.
Police also confirmed a man in his late 40s to early 50s nearby suffered slight injuries in the incident. They are also investigating reports that the suspect shouted “Britain first”, a possible reference to the far-right political party of that name, as he launched the attack. [Continue reading…]
BuzzFeed reports: In parliament Cox has proved herself a committed campaigner on the Syrian crisis. Last October she joined forces with Tory former international development secretary Andrew Mitchell to write an article in The Observer calling for more UK action to help desperate families in the region.
She also launched the all-party Parliamentary Friends of Syria group, which she now chairs. Cox abstained in the House of Commons vote on UK airstrikes in Syria, saying she was not against them in principle but “cannot actively support them unless they are part of a plan”.
Cox has described herself as a “huge President Obama fan” – indeed she worked on his first campaign in 2008 – but she has criticised both him and David Cameron for putting Syria on the “too difficult” pile. She warned last month this had led to the biggest refugee crisis in Europe in a generation and the emergence of ISIS. [Continue reading…]
Here is Cox speaking recently on the need to help Syrians.
Here she was giving her maiden speech last year, describing the diverse West Yorkshire constituency she represented:
The Guardian reports: Nigel Farage has been accused of engaging in the “politics of the gutter” after launching a campaign poster depicting a long queue of refugees, with the slogan “Breaking point”.
The advert, which has also appeared in the local press, shows a crowd of refugees and migrants walking along a road.
Yvette Cooper, the Labour MP for Pontefract and Castleford, who has campaigned on behalf of refugees, said: “Just when you thought leave campaigners couldn’t stoop any lower, they are now exploiting the misery of the Syrian refugee crisis in the most dishonest and immoral way.” [Continue reading…]
Gary Younge writes: During the 1964 election Harold Wilson spent a day campaigning in London marginals, addressing crowds from the back of a lorry. Invariably he would be harangued by bigots demanding the repatriation of nonwhite people. Wilson faced the hecklers down. “Whom should we send home? The nurses in our hospitals? The people who drive our buses. Where would our health service be without the black workers who keep it going?” According to the late Paul Foot: “These questions were greeted with great roars of approval from the crowd, and the hecklers were silenced.”
Elsewhere that year a notorious election campaign in Smethwick, near Birmingham, saw the Tory candidate, Peter Griffiths, slug his way to victory on an anti-immigration ticket buoyed by the slogan: “If you want a nigger for a neighbour vote Labour.” When asked to disown that sentiment Griffiths replied: “I would not condemn anyone who said that. I regard it as a manifestation of popular feeling.”
Labour won the election nationally, with a 3.5% swing, but lost in Smethwick because of a 7.2% swing against them. Later, in his diaries, the Labour minister Richard Crossman concluded that since Smethwick: “It has been quite clear [for Labour] that immigration can be the greatest potential vote-loser for the Labour party”.
Wary of making arguments that are moral or fact-based, Labour sought not to counter inflammatory rhetoric but to indulge it. The Tories understand that fear of immigration is how they get votes; Labour understand that’s how they lose them. The upshot is that precious few in the country understand what immigration is for, what drives it, or who benefits from it and why. [Continue reading…]
Politico reports: Voters in the United Kingdom could deliver a sharp jolt to the global economy and the 2016 U.S. presidential race next week.
Recent polls show strong momentum in Great Britain in favor of abandoning membership in the European Union when the nation votes in a referendum next Thursday, an event that could send global markets plunging, damage the fragile U.S. economy, presage the demise of the EU itself and present a fresh headache for Hillary Clinton in her effort to keep the White House in Democratic hands.
“If the U.K. chooses to leave next week there will be a lot of immediate volatility in markets,” said Megan E. Greene, chief economist at Manulife in Boston. “But you could also end up having an existential threat to the European Union and then the impact on the United States would be even bigger and the market dislocations that follows would be much larger.”
None of this would be welcome news for the Hillary Clinton campaign, which is already facing one destabilizing event in the Orlando massacre and could soon be faced with a second shock.
Clinton is counting on a strengthening U.S. economy to help her defeat presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump in the fall. But a vote in favor of the U.K. leaving the EU, especially if it’s followed by similar movements in Italy, France and other EU nations, could damage a U.S. economy that grew at just a 0.8 percent rate in the first quarter by driving stock prices lower, pushing the dollar higher, sapping investor and consumer confidence and damaging critical U.S. trading partners.
“The big question here is to what extent this fuels a much bigger phenomenon in anti-establishment movements across Europe, that’s where the real uncertainty is,” said Mohamed A. El-Erian, chief economic adviser at Allianz. “Brexit itself could knock a little bit off of U.S. GDP. For a bigger impact, you would need big recessions all across Europe.”
Global markets are already trembling at the prospect of Britain leaving the EU. [Continue reading…]
Polly Toynbee writes: The clutch of England fans in Marseille were unequivocal. “Fuck off Europe, we’re all voting out,” they chanted. I’ve spent the week listening to much the same, politer, but just as fingers-in-the-ears adamant. No fact, no persuader penetrates their certainty – and these were Labour voters. Will Labour’s campaign week, kicked off by Gordon Brown in the face of a dire new Guardian poll, shift many outers?
Inside Labour’s London HQ, I joined young volunteers manning the “Labour In” phones with every fact at the ready. We had sheets of Labour-supporting names to call in Nottinghamshire – and the results were grim. “Out”, “Out” and “Out” in call after call, only a couple for remain. “I’ve been Labour all my life, but I’m for leave,” they said. Why? Always the same – immigrants first; that mythical £350m saving on money sent to Brussels second; “I want my country back” third. And then there is, “I don’t know ANYONE voting in.”
Try arguing with facts and you get nowhere. Warn these Labour people what a Johnson/Gove government would do and they don’t care. Warn about the loss of workers’ rights and they don’t listen – maybe that’s already irrelevant to millions in crap jobs such as at Uber or Sports Direct. “We’re full up. Sorry, there’s no room for more. Can’t get GP appointments, can’t get into our schools, no housing.” If you tell these Labour voters that’s because of Tory austerity cuts, still they blame “immigrants getting everything first”. Warn about a Brexit recession leading to far worse cuts and they just say, “Stop them coming, make room for our own first.” [Continue reading…]
Roger Cohen writes: The foundations of the postwar world born from the rubble of Berlin are trembling. The old is dying, the new too inchoate to decipher. The politics of America mystify the world.
From Germany’s “zero hour” in 1945 there emerged in due course two institutions — NATO and the European Union — that together ushered Germany from its shame and Europe from its repetitive self-immolation. They cemented the United States as a European power. They fashioned European security and prosperity through unity.
Now NATO and the E.U. are questioned, even ridiculed. Forces of disintegration are on the march.
In less than two weeks, Britain will vote on whether to quit the Union. The referendum is too close to call. I believe that reason will prevail over derangement — at least one leader of the “Brexit” campaign has contemptibly compared the Union’s designs to Hitler’s — and that Britain will remain where it belongs: in Europe. But the scale of the disaster if Britain votes to leave should not be underestimated. It might mark the beginning of the end of the European Union. A political “bank run,” in the phrase of the political scientist Ivan Krastev, could ensue. [Continue reading…]
Anthony Barnett writes: Less than a month before the vote and polls suggest the outcome of the referendum might be Brexit. Why? I want to point the finger at my own kind: the progressive, well-educated, middle class, Europe-loving, opinion makers, 91% of whom, if you are Guardian-readers like me want to stay in the EU. Yes, my kin and kind, it is your fault that a Brexit result you so abhor is even possible. Like a bad cyclist who stares at the large, wild-looking dog they are trying to avoid and therefore steers into it, the English nation that alarms you so much is now giving you a well deserved bite up the bum. You should have befriended it.
Whatever the result of the referendum, whether it is a healthy majority for Remain, a narrow one, or a vote to Leave, the heart of the matter is that England has to have its own parliament. What the referendum reveals is that England both monopolises and is imprisoned by British Westminster and its culture of ‘to the victor the spoils’. To escape from this England is embracing Brexit because no other solution is on offer. It may be intimidated into remaining in the EU through fear of the economic consequences. But England’s frustrated desire for democracy has turned it against the EU rather than the real culprit, the British state.
Although a long fruitless succession of calls for England to ‘awake’ should warn off any further attempts, mine has three parts, each in a different tone. First, sociological, showing that England is the force behind the referendum. Second, subjective, highlighting the nature of Englishness. Third, political, arguing that action has to be taken to represent England fairly in all its glorious polyphony.
A recent ICM online poll has England showing Remain 43% with Leave on 44% and undecided 12%. Telephone polls have shown a significant lead for Remain, which the betting says is still the likely outcome on 23rd June. The reason that I’m bothering with an uncertain statistic is that this one allows comparison with Scotland where there is certainty. North of the border the same poll shows Remain is on 59% and Leave 28%, also with 12% undecided. The majority for Remain in Scotland is already more than twice as large as the ‘don’t knows’. This is reflected in its politicians. In Edinburgh Allan Little reports for the BBC, “It is striking how little high-profile support there is for Brexit in Scotland… During a debate in the Holyrood chamber last week, only eight of the 129 MSPs voted to leave the EU”. In England’s Westminster there was no such debate – a significant failure of nerve.
With the Remain lead unassailable, the Scottish nation has made up its mind. It is England that has yet to decide. The present uncertainty is not a question of how ‘Britain’ will vote. Leave or Remain is an English question. [Continue reading…]
Politico reports: France is not ready to let Britain get away from the European Union scot-free.
If the U.K. votes to leave on June 23, Paris will push to ensure that consequences are felt swiftly and severely to avoid emboldening anti-EU forces elsewhere in the bloc, senior EU diplomatic sources said.
France’s tough stance foreshadows major difficulties for London in the event of Brexit, as a core EU member tries to assert its influence in a reconfigured bloc and sway other countries against adopting an easygoing attitude toward Britain. Some of those countries, such as Germany, are more inclined to favor a softer approach.
The French push is focused on convincing the remaining EU countries to unwind all treaties and agreements binding the U.K. to the bloc quickly, so the divorce is sealed by withdrawing subsidies, re-evaluating trade relationships sector by sector, denying British supervisory bodies EU recognition in areas like financial services, and establishing new immigration rules, to name just a few levers, the sources said.
“If we say you are outside the EU but can keep all of the advantages, access to the single market without any solidarity, it’s a terrible message for the rest of the EU,” said a senior EU diplomat who asked not to be named due to the non-public nature of discussions. “[A painless Brexit] is impossible if we want to keep the rest of the EU present.”
The need to send a message is all the more pressing for the French political elite with the anti-EU National Front positioned to make a strong showing in the country’s 2017 presidential election. France would not be acting out of spite, officials said, and has no interest in setting off a tit-for-tat war of punitive measures.
But as a core EU member, sources said it had a responsibility to strengthen the bloc and deprive anti-EU parties — not just the FN but also the likes of Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom in the Netherlands — of a chance to use Britain as a shining example of what life can be after the European Union. [Continue reading…]
Rafael Behr writes: There is no precedent for a country quitting the EU. The crisis would be continental. The Brexit camp has no idea what should happen. There is a plan to walk out and slam the door, but nowhere to go next. Turmoil is part of the appeal for leaders of the leave campaign, although they dare not advertise thrill-seeking among their motives. It makes them sound reckless.
They are reckless. For Boris Johnson, there is a career advantage in hastening the collapse of David Cameron’s premiership. Relations with Britain’s closest trading partners can be collateral damage in that campaign. There is nothing in Johnson’s record to suggest interest in the welfare of anyone who cannot advance his ambition.
Michael Gove’s case is more intriguing. The justice secretary is drawn to disorder as a purgative tonic – a moral enema for constipated bureaucracies. David Laws, the former Liberal Democrat schools minister, in his chronicle of coalition, recounts a private apology Cameron once made for Gove’s impulses: “The thing that you’ve got to remember with Michael is that he is basically a bit of a Maoist. He believes that the world makes progress through a process of creative destruction.” [Continue reading…]
Pew Research Center reports: On June 23, people in the United Kingdom will vote on a referendum on whether to remain in the European Union or to leave the Brussels-based institution, a decision that has come to be called Brexit. The British go to the polls at a time when a new multi-nation survey from Pew Research Center finds that Euroskepticism is on the rise across Europe and that about two-thirds of both the British and the Greeks, along with significant minorities in other key nations, want some powers returned from Brussels to national governments. Whether favorable or not toward Brussels, most Europeans agree that a British exit would harm the 28-member EU. [Continue reading…]
I don’t think the desire to see some powers returned to national governments should be conflated with Euroskepticism. The latter questions the value of the existence of the EU, but the fact that a very large majority of those polled see the UK’s exit as being detrimental to the EU, strongly implies that there is widespread appreciation for the value of European unity.
A skeptical minority wants to break Europe apart, whereas the majority want to see revisions in the EU’s power structure.
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