Music: Tomasz Stańko Quartet — ‘Suspended Variation II’
The 75%: Young voters in the UK want to remain in the EU
“We are the 48,” protesters on the March for Europe chanted in London yesterday.
I guess it’s possible this slogan was meant as a warning against the tyranny of the majority, but it seems more likely it was intended as a way of saying, “we are too many to be ignored.”
Either way, and given the preponderance of young people marching, “We are the 75%,” might have sent a stronger message.
EU referendum by age group — 75% of voters aged 24 and under voted against Brexit https://t.co/eQci0vNffx pic.twitter.com/UADq1NaL8v
— POLITICO Europe (@POLITICOEurope) June 24, 2016
Even so, no sooner had this emphatic support among young voters for remaining in the EU been noted a week ago, then another number started circulating widely — this one from Sky News who reported that among 18-24 year olds, the turnout had only been 36%.
% who got through our final #EUref poll turnout filter by age group:
18-24: 36%
25-34: 58%
35-44: 72%
45-54: 75%
55-64: 81%
65+: 83%— Sky Data (@SkyData) June 25, 2016
Rather than viewing older voters as having betrayed the interests of their children and grandchildren, it looked like voter apathy among the young was as much to blame for the victory of the Leave camp.
But at the time, Barbara Speed at the New Statesman noted:
Sky isn’t claiming this is collected data – it’s projected, and a subsequent tweet said it was based on “9+/10 certainty to vote, usually/always votes, voted/ineligible at GE2015”. I’ve asked for more information on what this means, but for now it’s enough to say it’s nothing more than a guess.
Francesca Barber, who describes herself as British, European, and American, says “my generation failed to turn up… If we want our world to reflect our values and beliefs, we are going to have to engage and vote.”
But maybe before making strong judgments about generational failure, it’s worth having some renewed skepticism about the numbers in the Sky News tweet.
Michael Bruter, professor of political science and European politics at the LSE, and his colleague, Dr Sarah Harrison, have been analyzing responses from 2,113 British adults questioned between 24 and 30 June.
The Guardian reports:
Bruter and Harrison said they found turnout among young people to be far higher than data has so far suggested. “Young people cared and voted in very large numbers. We found turnout was very close to the national average, and much higher than in general and local elections.
“After correcting for over-reporting [people always say they vote more than they do], we found that the likely turnout of 18- to 24-year-olds was 70% – just 2.5% below the national average – and 67% for 25- to 29-year-olds.
This suggests that even if turnout among young voters had matched the national average, the outcome of the referendum would still have been the same.
For this reason, it’s perhaps worth restating: the outcome of the 2016 EU referendum was conclusive.
Nevertheless, there’s a strong argument to be made that a second referendum will still be necessary at the conclusion of Brexit negotiations, bearing in mind that no one even knows when or if that conclusion will be reached.
The EU has a serious credibility problem when it comes to its perceived lack of commitment to democratic processes. Many EU leaders are currently preoccupied with the fear that favorable terms for Brexit will have a domino effect across the Union. At the same time, some are calling for a “new vision for Europe.”
If the EU gets serious about this and goes beyond measures that are merely forms of damage control, then by the time the UK has finalized its withdrawal terms, the EU the UK will then be about to leave should be quite different from the one to which it now belongs.
This point will be reached in 2019 at the earliest or quite likely some years later. A referendum of British voters at that time would provide the basis for an informed decision.
This is not much different from having an opportunity and the time to read the small print before signing a contract. As things stand right now, British voters bought into a proposition whose terms are completely unknown.
Given that the Council of the European Union, through the Treaty of Nice, employs the use of a form of qualified majority voting which requires support representing 62% of the EU population, the UK could reasonably adopt the same principle in requiring that a second referendum seeking informed consent would need to cross the same threshold.
The EU and the UK have a common interest in showing that Brexit, as it unfolds, demonstrates a mutual commitment to the democratic process whatever the outcome.
A climate of fear: Brexit vote triggers eruption of racism
The Guardian reports: In a room in St George’s Cathedral, Southwark, south London, on Thursday morning, more than 80 people, spilling into the corridor, talk about their experiences since the referendum result.
They are mainly from South America, holding Spanish passports, still members of the European Union, legitimately in the UK. Half a dozen had been expected. Barristers María González-Merello and John Samson hold a free weekly legal advice clinic for Spanish-speaking cleaners who work for government departments and major companies in the city. This was different.
“We called an emergency meeting because we’ve had so many people telling us about incidents [of apparent racism and xenophobia],” González-Merello says. “One woman had a cut in her pay packet, and when she complained she was told if she didn’t like it she should go back home. Another man was waiting for the night bus at 2am to go to work when a stranger said: ‘Haven’t you heard the news? You should have left.’”
At the meeting, packed with babies, toddlers and anxious adult faces, one woman says she has worked for an employer for six years. On the Friday of the referendum result she was offered a new, less attractive, zero-hours contract.
Another young woman says she and her friends, all with Spanish passports, regularly visit a Watford nightclub. Last weekend they were refused entry. “Is this because of Brexit?” they asked. The answer was yes.
González-Merello, who has lived in Britain for 20 years, says she was talking to her son on a bus in Spanish and a man said: “You fucking foreigners, you are always making a noise.”
Victims such as her, she says, are now self-policing, taking care, for instance, not to speak in a language other than English in public. Her 12-year-old son recently asked: “Mama, are you going to be deported?”
“It’s the hurt and humiliation,” she says. “And the concern that we don’t know where it may end.” [Continue reading…]
Britain must have a general election before activating Article 50
Nick Clegg, former leader of Britain’s Liberal Democrats and former deputy prime minister, writes: Who would have thought? The Conservative party, the party of continuity and tradition, is now the cause of the greatest constitutional crisis in modern times. The party of business is now the source of reckless economic turmoil. The natural party of government is now presiding over paralysis in Westminster and Whitehall. The party of the British bulldog spirit is now leading our great country towards rudderless introspection.
There is something almost grotesque in the contrast between the self-indulgence of the Conservative leadership contest and the anxiety gripping millions of families worried about the future. The media swarms around Michael Gove’s self-absorbed pronouncements justifying the tawdry betrayal of his friends.
A nervous nation, unsure what it has done to itself, is subject to the tedious, vituperative comments from one Conservative nonentity about another. No wonder Theresa May – a diligent, hard-working if unimaginative politician – stands out as a grownup in that political playground.
This cannot go on. Somehow we must navigate the country through the months ahead. The government not only finds itself without leadership, it has no plan, no consensus and no clue about what it wants to do in the future. The only thing it agrees on is that the UK should leave the EU. But how, when and to what end all remain unanswered. It enjoys a mandate to quit, but no mandate as to how this should be done. [Continue reading…]
Brexit might provide an opportunity for genuine change in Europe
Ragnar Weilandt writes: the UK’s expectations of the EU were always mainly transactional rather than emotional or ideological. The founding members created the ECSC [European Coal and Steel Community] to end centuries of war. Southern European countries joined the Common Market in order to stabilize their democracies. The central and eastern Europeans joined the EU to adapt the Western European political and economic system and to end decades of Russian domination. Most member states and their citizens cherished the Union’s promotion of peace, freedom, democracy and human rights. In contrast, British elites and citizens primarily cared about market access.
The UK’s transactional expectations influenced its action. Many great continental leaders were inspired by the European idea. While it did not always influence their daily policy and rhetoric, it often guided important decisions and major speeches. In contrast, British leaders were largely driven by a continuous assessment of short-term costs and benefits. Moreover, they frequently resorted to cheap populism at the cost of the EU for the sake of short-term gains in domestic politics.
Since the UK joined the Common Market, it has used its status and its power as a big member state to secure special treatment at the cost of its fellow member states. Moreover, it opted-out of many of the EU’s basic structures such as Schengen and the Euro. In doing so, the UK set a precedent for smaller states’ cherry-picking. Moreover, it spearheaded various attempts to slow down political integration. Hence, successive British governments contributed to the inadequacy of the European institutional set-up that caused the various crises the EU is currently facing as well as its institutional inability to deal with them. It even actively obstructed the EU’s crisis management, notably by trying to block the fiscal compact in 2011 or more recently by refusing to participate in the European system of quotas to resettle refugees.
And at a time when the EU and its members are struggling with these crises and therefore have more than enough on their plates, British voters decide to hand it yet another major crisis. A crisis that will not only take away major political and administrative resources desperately needed to fix the Union, but also one that undermines and potentially even endangers the European project as a whole. Much like Charles de Gaulle predicted [when opposing British membership].
The UK certainly made its fair share of contributions to European integration. Notably it pushed for completing the single market and made the case for Eastern and Southern enlargement. It is a sad historical irony that diffuse fears of immigrants from these countries ended up being the reason for many voters’ decision to back Leave. However, in terms of transforming the EU into a well-functioning political entity, the UK has become a major stumbling block.
A stumbling block that might now disappear. [Continue reading…]
Why Russia likes Brexit
Alexander Baunov writes: There are two chief complaints about the EU among Russian diplomats and foreign policy professionals. First, they argue that it is not an entirely independent political entity or sovereign body because the United States dictates its most important decisions.
Second, they argue that the EU has changed for the worse in recent times. Enlargement to the east means that Brussels now heeds too much the small Eastern European countries, which have a generally hostile attitude toward Russia. Great Britain is the most pro-American EU country and is prone to listen to Eastern European countries’ concerns about Russia. In contrast to Italy, France, or Germany, the Brits have never talked about lifting sanctions against Russia.
There is also the issue that the Russian leadership feels personally offended by Britain. Vladimir Putin and Tony Blair started off as firm friends and built a relationship. Putin’s first visit to the West was to London. Then, the British started supporting Putin’s enemies, they believe, and giving refuge to men like Boris Berezovsky and Alexander Litvinenko. So, with the separation of Britain from the rest of Europe, it will become easier to deal with the other countries of the EU.
One of Russian diplomacy’s most cherished dreams is to build relationships with every European country individually. Brexit makes this dream much more attainable. Russia dreams of a Europe of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when European Entente meant that nations could negotiate with, support, or restrain each other. A Britain apart from the European Union is a return to a Europe of the past that Russian politicians hope will also be a future Europe.
This dream is unlikely to be realized, however, and it’s worth remembering what this bygone international system led to: two world wars in which Russia suffered more than any other country. [Continue reading…]
EU tells Swiss no single market access if no free movement of citizens
The Guardian reports: The European Union is to show its determination to make no concessions to the UK on Brexit terms by telling Switzerland it will lose access to the single market if it goes ahead with plans to impose controls on the free movement of EU citizens.
The Swiss-EU talks, under way for two years but now needing a solution possibly within weeks, throws up the exact same issues that will be raised in the UK’s exit talks – the degree to which the UK must accept free movement of the EU’s citizens as a price for access to the single market.
The Swiss are desperate to strike a deal in order to give its politicians time to pass the necessary laws to meet a February 2017 deadline imposed by a legally binding referendum in 2014.
The former president of the FDP-Liberal Radicals, Philipp Müller, on Sunday said the Brexit threat should serve as a warning to the Swiss, amid suggestions in Brussels the prospect of UK-EU exit talks meant there was less willingness to give ground on freedom of movement. [Continue reading…]
Venezuela’s democratic façade has completely crumbled
Moisés Naim and Francisco Toro write: Today, Venezuela is the sick man of Latin America, buckling under chronic shortages of everything from food and toilet paper to medicine and freedom. Riots and looting have become commonplace, as hungry people vent their despair while the revolutionary elite lives in luxury, pausing now and then to order recruits to fire more tear gas into crowds desperate for food.
Not long ago, the regime that Hugo Chávez founded was an object of fascination for progressives worldwide, attracting its share of another-world-is-possible solidarity activists. Today, as the country sinks deeper into the Western Hemisphere’s most intractable political and economic crisis, the time has come to ask some hard questions about how this regime — so obviously thuggish in hindsight — could have conned so many international observers for so long.
Chávez was either admired as a progressive visionary who gave voice to the poor or dismissed as just another third-world buffoon. Reality was more complex than that: Chávez pioneered a new playbook for how to bask in global admiration even as he hollowed out democratic institutions on the sly. [Continue reading…]
At least 82 killed as ISIS bombing targets Ramadan shoppers in Baghdad
Reuters reports: At least 82 people were killed and 200 injured in two bombings that hit Baghdad around midnight Saturday, nearly all of them in a blast targeting a busy shopping area as they celebrated Ramadan, police and medical sources said Sunday.
A refrigerator truck packed with explosives blew up in Karrada in central Baghdad, killing 80 people and injuring at least 200. Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, in a statement circulated online by supporters of the ultra-hard line Sunni group. It said the blast was a suicide bombing.
Karrada was busy at the time as Iraqis eat out late during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, which ends next week. Police said the toll could rise as more bodies could be lying under the rubble of devastated buildings.
The bombing is the deadliest in the country since Iraqi forces last month dislodged Islamic State militants from Falluja, their stronghold just west of the capital that had served as a launch pad for such attacks. [Continue reading…]
Bangladeshis behind restaurant killings, international link probed
Reuters reports: Seven militants who killed 20 people at a restaurant in Dhaka were local Bangladeshis and authorities had tried before to arrest five of them, police said, as investigators probed for possible links with international Islamist extremist groups.
The gunmen stormed the upmarket restaurant in the diplomatic zone late on Friday, before killing mostly non-Muslim hostages, including at least nine Italians, seven Japanese and an American.
Islamic State claimed responsibility, warning citizens of “crusader countries” that their citizens would not be safe “as long as their aircraft are killing Muslims”, the group said in a statement. It also posted pictures of five fighters grinning in front of a black flag who it said were involved in the attack, according to the SITE monitoring website.
The claims have not been confirmed, but Bangladesh Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan told Reuters late on Saturday that neither Islamic State nor al Qaeda was involved. He reiterated the government’s line that home-grown militants were responsible for a spate of killings in the country over the past 18 months.
“This was done by JMB,” Khan said, referring to Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh, which claims to represent Islamic State in Bangladesh. [Continue reading…]
Learning from nature: Record-efficiency turbine farms are being inspired by sealife
Alex Riley writes: As they drove on featureless dirt roads on the first Tuesday of 2010, John Dabiri, professor of aeronautics and bioengineering at the California Institute of Technology, and his then-student Robert Whittlesey, were inspecting a remote area of land that they hoped to purchase to test new concepts in wind power. They named their site FLOWE for Field Laboratory for Optimized Wind Energy. Situated between gentle knolls covered in sere vegetation, the four-acre parcel in Antelope Valley, California, was once destined to become a mall, but those plans fell through. The land was cheap. And, more importantly, it was windy.
Estimated at 250 trillion Watts, the amount of wind on Earth has the potential to provide more than 20 times our current global energy consumption. Yet, only four countries — Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and Denmark — generate more than 10 percent of their electricity this way. The United States, one of the largest, wealthiest, and windiest of countries, comes in at about 4 percent. There are reasons for that. Wind farm expansion brings with it huge engineering costs, unsightly countryside, loud noises, disruption to military radar, and death of wildlife. Recent estimates blamed turbines for killing 600,000 bats and up to 440,000 birds a year. On June 19, 2014, the American Bird Conservancy filed a lawsuit against the federal government asking it to curtail the impact of wind farms on the dwindling eagle populations. And while standalone horizontal-axis turbines harvest wind energy well, in a group they’re highly profligate. As their propeller-like blades spin, the turbines facing into the wind disrupt free-flowing air, creating a wake of slow-moving, infertile air behind them. [Continue reading…]
Music: Tomasz Stańko Quartet — ‘Soul of Things: Variation II’
White House opts for distraction of holiday weekend when disclosing dubious count on civilian death toll from drone strikes
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports: The US government today claimed it has killed between 64 and 116 “non-combatants” in 473 counter-terrorism strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya between January 2009 and the end of 2015.
This is a fraction of the 380 to 801 civilian casualty range recorded by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism from reports by local and international journalists, NGO investigators, leaked government documents, court papers and the result of field investigations.
While the number of civilian casualties recorded by the Bureau is six times higher than the US Government’s figure, the assessments of the minimum total number of people killed were strikingly similar. The White House put this figure at 2,436, whilst the Bureau has recorded 2,753.
Since becoming president in 2009, Barack Obama has significantly extended the use of drones in the War on Terror. Operating outside declared battlefields, such as Afghanistan and Iraq, this air war has been largely fought in Pakistan and Yemen.
The White House’s announcement today is long-awaited. It comes three years after the White House first said it planned to publish casualty figures, and four months after President Obama’s chief counter-terrorism adviser, Lisa Monaco, said the data would be released.
The figures released do not include civilians killed in drones strikes that happened under George W Bush, who instigated the use of counter-terrorism strikes outside declared war zones and in 58 strikes killed 174 reported civilians. [Continue reading…]
The New York Times reports: In a seeming acknowledgment that the long-anticipated disclosure would be greeted with skepticism by critics of the drone program, the administration issued the numbers on a Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend. The use of a range of estimated civilian deaths underscored the fact that the government often does not know for sure the affiliations of those killed.
“They’re guessing, too,” said Bill Roggio, editor of the Long War Journal at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, who has tracked civilian deaths for more than a decade. “Theirs may be a little more educated than my guesses. But they cannot be completely accurate.”
The disclosure about civilian deaths and the executive order, the subject of months of bureaucratic deliberations, carried broader significance. Issued about seven months before Mr. Obama leaves office, the order further institutionalized and normalized airstrikes outside conventional war zones as a routine part of 21st-century national security policy. [Continue reading…]
Trump wants us to follow the Brits into a corner of isolation
Timothy Egan writes: In committing economic suicide, Britain is trying to close the door and hide from the world. It felt good, no doubt, to tell those overbearing bureaucrats in Brussels to bugger off. We’ll stick with our bangers and mash without any interference from Europe! But the Brexit vote was also a drunken swing at those “others” remaking the image of a lost England. To hear the haters tell it, “Polish vermin” and brown-skinned hordes have overwhelmed the little island nation.
Trump wants us to follow the Brits into a corner of isolation — by race, religion and trade. His philosophy, the rant of a besotted boob making things up in public, is anti-American at its core. In rejecting our former colonial masters, we threw off monarchy, the class system and a state religion. We opened our doors to all nations, all religions, all opinions.
The New World can certainly learn much from the Old World. But the sun never sets on a stupid idea. And this vote to stop the spinning globe and get off at 1952 is among the stupidest. Britain is cracking up now because it followed the crackpots. The United States could make the same mistake — rejecting free trade, and rejecting a welcome mat for free people.
Today, about 13 percent of Britain is foreign-born. What’s disruptive, especially in the timeless tableau of rural England, is that the number of immigrants has more than doubled since 1993. That’s what caused some of the open hatred in the campaign to leave the European Union. Trump is playing with that same fire now. [Continue reading…]
Brexit: The immigrants who voted Leave
Fading hope: Why the youth of the Arab Spring are still unemployed
By Heath J. Prince, University of Texas at Austin
The 2011 Arab Spring was a clear signal to governments and ruling parties that the time had come for reform, if not revolution. People in the Middle East and North Africa were demanding nothing less than sweeping political, social and economic change.
The upheaval was prompted by economic stagnation and a slow unraveling of social safety nets, borne disproportionately by the working class. Protesters made it clear that change would come not from autocrats or international financial institutions, but from the people themselves.
As is the case in Sub-Saharan Africa, economic growth has not translated into employment for large segments of the Middle East and North Africa populations. Recent analyses of post-Arab Spring policies demonstrate that state-level efforts to address one of the root causes of the Arab Spring, youth unemployment, are at best, a mixed bag and, at worst, represent a return to a pre-Arab Spring status quo.
Failure to address this most fundamental grievance could lay the groundwork for a renewed revolt and ensuing disorder.
When asked what sort of change he expected to see in five years, one young man who had been active in the 2011 revolt, answered, “Nothing – the same as today. Nothing has changed. Nothing will.”
Donald Trump loves crazy conspiracy theories — just like the majority of Americans
The Boston Globe reports: Sometimes, Donald Trump sounds as though he is just passing on information, as he did after Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died. “They say they found a pillow on his face,” Trump told a radio interviewer, “which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow.”
Other times, he seems to be wondering aloud, as he did when he suggested the Clintons might have been involved in what he termed the “very fishy” 1993 suicide of former White House aide Vince Foster.
More famously, he helped drive the so-called birther movement, insisting that President Obama was not born in the United States and that investigators he had sent to Hawaii would expose “one of the greatest cons in the history of politics and beyond.”
Trump’s affinity for conspiracy theories might seem the stuff of a few kooks and cranks living in their parents’ basement.
But far from being a marginal phenomenon, conspiracy theories have always been part of the American political landscape and are believed by more than 55 percent of the public — a group that cuts across race, gender, income, and political affiliation, according to researchers and polls.
The surprising breadth of conspiracy beliefs shows that while Trump’s rhetoric may repel a large segment of voters, it is also tapping a deep vein of thought among Americans who distrust elites and suspect that larger, darker forces are orchestrating domestic and world events.
“When I started studying conspiracy theories, I was stunned,” said Thomas J. Wood, a political scientist at Ohio State University. “I thought I was going to find them on the fringes of American attitudes, but they are a core way that Americans read about and explain political phenomena in response to uncertainty.” [Continue reading…]
Inside the six weeks Donald Trump was a nonstop ‘birther’
The New York Times reports: Joseph Farah, a 61-year-old author, had long labored on the fringes of political life, publishing a six-part series claiming that soybeans caused homosexuality and fretting that “cultural Marxists” were plotting to destroy the country.
But in early 2011, he received the first of several calls from a Manhattan real estate developer who wanted to take one of his theories mainstream.
That developer, Donald J. Trump, told Mr. Farah that he shared his suspicion that President Obama might have been born outside the United States and that he was looking for a way to prove it.
“What can we do to get to the bottom of this?” Mr. Trump asked him. “What can we do to turn the tide?”
Mr. Farah recalled that Mr. Trump even proposed dispatching private investigators to Hawaii, Mr. Obama’s birthplace, to resolve the debate.
Mr. Trump’s eagerness to embrace the so-called birther idea — long debunked, and until then confined to right-wing conspiracy theorists — foreshadowed how, just five years later, Mr. Trump would bedevil his rivals in the Republican presidential primary race and upend the political system.
In the birther movement, Mr. Trump recognized an opportunity to connect with the electorate over an issue many considered taboo: the discomfort, in some quarters of American society, with the election of the nation’s first black president. He harnessed it for political gain, beginning his connection with the largely white Republican base that, in his 2016 campaign, helped clinch his party’s nomination. [Continue reading…]