One of my pet peeves this election has been the idea of “lending your vote”. The idea that you “lent” the Tories your vote to get Brexit done, but that you aren’t actually a Tory voter.
No. You are now a Tory voter, and your vote for the Tories has helped deliver five more years of Tory rule. You’ve voted for the Bullingdon boys and the credit traders and all the rest of them. At least be honest about it.
Seven weeks left in the EU, a year of tortuous trade negotiations, and years of damage once those negotiations either fail and lead to no deal, or are extended again and again until they’re concluded.
There’ll be bulldozers over/The White Cliffs of Dover...
After three years of banging on about Brexit here at any opportunity, I couldn’t bring myself to repeat it all in the past six weeks, and the General Election itself has been too depressing to contemplate. It seems clear that most people made up their minds long ago, and in far too many cases have done so on the basis that leave means leave, get it done, take back control, three bags full, pigs might fly. The one ray of hope is the surge in new enrolments in November, suggesting that younger voters could lead to upsets in key seats. Perhaps, just possibly, we might yet see the back of this hat-trick of historically awful prime ministers.
British journalists have become part of Johnson’s fake news machine.
Brexit, a study in politics versus law.
Johnson has destroyed what is left of the UK’s credibility.
How Johnson could deliver No Deal on 31 October despite the Benn Act. 30,000 refugees in the UK are at risk if there’s no deal. Even a deal would just be the end of the beginning of Brexit.
Years and Years wasn’t meant to be a documentary.
Eight of the top ten Brexit-Party-promoting Twitter accounts appear to be bots. EP Today looks like a front for RT.
Without the Beeching report there might never have been Brexit.
The Hustle, by musician and journalist Rhodri Marsden, is a disco concept album about Brexit.
If you can’t make it to the rally on Saturday, chip in to the student coach fund.
Prominent Brexiter Steve Baker MP has quoted a line from Milton’s “Paradise Lost” to exalt No Deal. But it seems he didn’t check whose words they were supposed to be.
Boris Johnson wrote in his letter yesterday to Jean-Claude Juncker that “the proposed ‘backstop’ is a bridge to nowhere, and a new way forward must be found”. If Johnson is an expert on anything he’s an expert on bridges to nowhere.
Ian Dunt excoriates Johnson’s Brexit plan. There’s a lot of presumption in the media today that every MP who ever wanted some sort of deal will want this deal, which isn’t even a possible deal unless the EU agrees to it. The Brexit steering group of the European Parliament aren’t having any of it. The EU is preparing for life without us.
The Festival of Brexit seems to come sooner and sooner every year. Here are some limericks to celebrate Boris Johnson’s latest proposal, which is sure to win support from the EU, MPs, Leavers and Remainers alike, and isn’t at all designed to fail so that he can blame everyone except himself.
Johnson has learned the wrong lessons about leadership from his predecessors.
The man behind Britain’s chaos.
The arrival of Trumpian Britain.
Given the sweeping under the carpet of Leave campaign irregularities by UK authorities in recent days, I feared the worst yesterday, and feared that a ruling in the government’s favour would open the door to the neutering of British parliamentary democracy. So it was an unexpected relief to hear the unanimous conclusion of eleven Supreme Court judges that Johnson’s prorogation was “unlawful, null and of no effect”. Parliamentary democracy lives, and parliament itself returned today to try to head off the looming disaster that Johnson seems determined to bring down upon us.
If a week is a long time in politics, the two weeks since Boris Johnson’s government announced the prorogation of parliament has been an age. Johnson has lost his majority, lost (or ejected) 22 Conservative MPS, and lost six out of his first six votes in Parliament. Since the dramatic scenes at the close of parliament on Monday night, we have learned that the government’s act of prorogation is unlawful (subject to an appeal to the UK Supreme Court to be heard next Tuesday), and that even the barest of outlines of Operation Yellowhammer, the government’s contingency plan for a No Deal Brexit, is enough to demonstrate that Project Fear was always Project Reality. (Here’s a pithy Yellowhammer summary in summary.)
I mentioned the other day that my London photos contained another gallery in the making. Here it is: Henry VIII’s magnificent pile, as seen on a sunny day in the summer of 2006.
I had an email from a visitor to the site last week, complimenting my Scottish Sand photos of North Berwick (thanks!) and wondering if I’d ever taken any of Rosslyn Chapel. I saw the chapel a few times between 2005 and 2011, but haven’t been back since, and hadn’t done much with my photos of it. Still, it was a good prompt to go back over them, the first of which were taken on a 2-megapixel Canon IXUS and the rest on a 5-megapixel Lumix. Between them I had decent coverage of the interior and exterior of the chapel, including its roof, which at the time was accessible using the scaffolding in place during its repair. I haven’t got any exterior photos without that scaffolding, so I’ll have to go back to get some, but in the meantime here’s a collection of the best of them.
There was a lot of buzz in Remain circles last week about a Guardian Long Read article on the radicalisation of remain by Daniel Cohen. (I liked Alex Andreou’s take on it.)
Much of the article is reasonably straight reportage of the general landscape of Remain activism, particularly the Twitter side, but the tone is skewed by Cohen’s use of the term “remainist” to make it seem as if hardcore remainers are some sort of extreme fringe. The label “remainer” seems perfectly adequate to me. We’ve had no trouble distinguishing between different types of remainers to date—people have talked about Remain voters versus Remainers, or “hardcore remainers” as the Guardian puts it in the lede of Cohen’s article. “Remainer” means more than just “somebody who voted remain”, because at least some remain voters are now leavers, just as some leave voters are now remainers. It’s also flexible enough to include those who are generally supportive of remaining, through to those who are passionate enough to go on a march, tweet or post to Mefi Brexit threads, through to those who have given up their day jobs to devote themselves to the cause. It’s a broad church, and it isn’t defined by #FBPE.
It’s over five years since the last collection of Scottish castles at Detail, so here are six more, represented in collages compiled from trips over the past few years to Galloway, Glasgow, East Lothian and Perthshire. This gallery brings me up to date with my photos at long last, apart from the unscanned 35mm negatives, although some travel I’ve got planned for the rest of this year will no doubt bring some more.
Last year I finally started doing justice to a large backlog of photographs intended for Detail, chipping away at sorting, resizing and arranging them into galleries. I’m now near the end of that process, with only a couple more to go. Here are some featuring my everyday surrounds, with photos taken in and around Edinburgh.
The next batch of galleries at Detail looks closer to home, recording trips to the west of Scotland going back over a decade. It’s a beautiful part of the country, with plenty of out-of-the-way places little-known to tourists.
The European Elections are out of the way, and soon Theresa May will be as well.
Remember when it was early December, and we were all in agony awaiting the first Meaningful Vote on May’s deal, which ended up not happening that month? That was only four months ago. If we have six more months of this, we’re not even halfway through the end of the beginning.
56 hours to go, and we still don’t know if we’re going.
Once again the UK is potentially days away from crashing out of the EU with no deal, with no clear path to avoiding it. Theresa May is in talks with Jeremy Corbyn about reaching a cross-party agreement which could trade away our freedom of movement and any chance of a people’s vote for some vague statements about post-Brexit negotiating aims. On Monday in Parliament Labour whipped in favour of three indicative motions to find a way forward, but not for Joanna Cherry’s crucial emergency brake, on which many of its MPs abstained. If we crash out because of that, or leave on the barest of terms with Corbyn’s approval, many voters will be abstaining from voting for Labour.
A BuzzFeed report on EU officials’ responses to the past couple of days of UK political developments has just the best punchline.
I’ve long thought that Labour’s switch to selecting its leader via a direct membership vote was a wrong turn, and that the next Tory leadership battle will be disastrous for the same reason.
Two weeks until a possible No Deal, and we’re all having to twiddle our thumbs for five days until Meaningful Vote 3 to see what fresh hell awaits us.
At the beginning of last month my family and I caught the train down to Manchester for the weekend, to have a look around its vibrant mix of old and new buildings and attend some special events, like the CBBC tour at MediaCityUK and a Day of Percussion at the Royal Northern College of Music. My son and I had been to Manchester before, but spent all of that trip looking at much smaller buildings, so this was effectively a first proper visit to the city itself. There was a good Martin Parr exhibition at the Manchester Art Gallery; we saw Stephenson’s Rocket and the world’s first railway station at the Science and Industry Museum; and I finally got to see the Daniel Libeskind-designed Imperial War Museum North from the inside. I liked it all. Still didn’t manage a curry on Rusholme Street, though.
Here’s the compulsory gallery for Detail, this time posted within a month rather than after 1+ years. (With a few extra photos from last visit which have sat on my hard drive for seven, ahem.)
With three weeks to go, Britain is unprepared for any kind of Brexit and unable to decide which way to turn, with May’s government operating under a cloak of secrecy and considering prolonging the indecision if parliament’s second vote on her Withdrawal Agreement fails next week. The endless Brexit lies have left us in an Orwellian nightmare, with some MPs receiving death threats every single day. Now new lies are doing the rounds of social media, as questionable money buys who knows what amount of under-the-radar campaigning in advance of a possible second referendum. Bookmakers, though, consider the odds of a second referendum to be worse than those of No Deal (5/1 versus 4/1 respectively), with the odds of the latter shortening.
I’d better post something to mark our penultimate month in the EU. Since the parliamentary votes at the end of January I’ve been resigned to the worst, and too ill for most of the month to pay the daily ins and outs much attention, but here are a few things I noticed and briefly commented on along the way.
Another precious week has passed with no sign of progress on Brexit, as everyone waits for next week’s next parliamentary vote.
Theresa May’s statement to Parliament yesterday about her Brexit Plan B was a non-event, after a week of even more floundering about than we’ve come to expect. Gina Miller has written about the need for MPs to use the parliamentary sovereignty that she fought for. David Lammy MP argues that even a Norway outcome would be lose-lose. A backbench effort to rule out a no-deal Brexit is supposedly supported in private by much of the government, who don’t want to do it themselves for fear of splitting their party. But might explicitly ruling out No Deal mean that May’s deal ends up getting through?
Tom Watson played a blinder in his speech to the House during the no-confidence vote. Just look at May’s laughter when he points out the impact of the past thirty months on EU27 citizens living in Britain. Nervous laughter, or laughter at the idea that she’s failed to give them reassurance, or outright indifference: whichever it is, it’s a terrible look.
I’ve been thinking about what I’d say to Lexiters, and any other Brexiter who’s willing to listen, that might get past the whole “will it/won’t it be a disaster” debate with firmly held positions on both sides. I’m not sure it would help in most cases, but it might in some...
The meaningful vote is due in something like six or seven hours, and the anticipation is hard to bear.
Two short sentences in a comments thread woke my inner satirist.
That’s an argument, not a story. A story gets an emotional reaction.
Now that Christmas is out of the way, Parliament’s vote on the EU withdrawal agreement, delayed by Theresa May in December, is imminent. The ever-reliable Ian Dunt has explained Wednesday’s extraordinary events in the Commons, which came two days after a small group of Brexit supporters staged a yellow vest protest and three days after the government staged a fake traffic jam intended to show that we could survive without a deal, so there.
