This is of course something we should all fear. There’s nothing good on offer in English politics right now. Looking over the options – the so-called alternatives, is like surveying a mediaeval torturer’s work bench; while some of the implements are qualitatively better or worse than others, none of them are exactly what you’d call ‘health promoting.’ There are the pincers, there to rip the flesh from the victim – used to inflict maximum suffering while not endangering the life of the condemned.
Changing of the Guard
In his more sober moments – not that they’re many, even Johnson knows he isn’t driving the Brexit bus here. His mistake is a classic one. Like Cameron and May before him, he thought he could use the racist far-right to his advantage, but the outcome is always and everywhere the same – this particular tail always ends up wagging the dog, and Johnson is being wagged. We all are. The genie is out of the bottle in British politics. The far-right in the guise of the Brexit Party, UKIP, the EDL, and every thuggish messiah of British nationalist street politics is on the march.
Doomed to Failure
Every one of the commitments made today by our new Prime Minister outside Number 10 cannot be delivered. At best, over the next few weeks and month, we will be fed a diet of platitudes, slogans, and outright lies. But, as the saying goes, Johnson is all fur coat and no knickers. In a previous essay I believe I hit the nail on the head when I described Johnson as the Anton Drexler of British politics. He is the placeholder leader who will make the monster to come more palatable.
Stay of Execution
May’s result tonight was more than a stay of execution for herself. This was a stay of execution for the British union state. Brexit, as it works itself out, has a number of grimly inevitable conclusions. It will leave the United Kingdom poorer and in a long-term downward economic decline; a weight that will be disproportionately carried by the poorest. Social tensions will be stretched to breaking point, with a sharp increase in racism and race-related hate crime.
Catalunya: The Failure of European Democracy
The truth is that Spain has narrowly avoided an armed conflict in Catalunya, and no country has done more to provoke a war in Europe in recent decades than has Spain in Catalunya. Thanks mainly, we can be sure, to the misguided trust of the Catalan leadership in the honest brokerage of the EU and the European states this has not happened. Yet, now having learned this lesson, we cannot be certain that any similar event will end so “peacefully.”
The European Union after Catalunya
The European Union has not, in any meaningful sense, spoken up in the defence of Catalunya. More than this, it has not spoken up in the defence of freedom and democracy – not for the Catalans and not for anyone. The watchword everywhere, even echoed by the Scottish Secretary of State, is that this is a matter for Spain and the Spanish Constitution. Once again power has been justified by the law it wrote for itself and its own preservation.
ScotRef: It’s Decision Time Scotland
The National Party was returned to government in Scotland, with a majority support in Edinburgh for independence, on the promise that with a material change in the circumstances pertaining to the settlement of 18 September 2014 it would give Scotland another say. Since the result of the EU referendum the entire political terrain of the UK has been changed. Nothing is as it was in 2014.
Ausgang Schottland: Why a Rally in Berlin is a Big Deal
Nations exist on the international stage not because the nationals of nations say they exist. They exist because other nations; the international community, recognise their existence. This cornerstone of international law is the Westphalian settlement, and the growing awareness of this in Scotland is motivating more people in the independence movement to look beyond the shores of Scotland in search of support for Scottish statehood. Berlin is the obvious first destination.
Random Public Journal 