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Polly doesn’t quite get it

Well, obviously, Polly doesn’t quite get it

Even if Theresa May’s rotten deal scrapes through, Brexit will fester for a generation
Polly Toynbee

It has been festering for a generation love…..

26 thoughts on “Polly doesn’t quite get it”

  1. Except it won’t Polly. Instead we will move on. And those unhappy Labour MPs, without Brexit to distract them, will turn inwards. And the reckoning for your precious progressive party will be upon you.

    It reminds me of that scene in Elizabeth: the son to be very dead Norfolk says “The people will remember”. “No” replies Walsingham, “They will forget”.

    Everyone will now forget they were ever Remainers, just as everyone forget they believed in appeasement.

  2. Polly’s main concern is the possibility of waiting in line at Italian customs when she’s visiting her villa. Totally unacceptable to one of the European elite.

  3. The balance of trade with the rest of the world is the real game changer. When trade was mostly around gravity, like coal, beef and olives, the EEC/EU really mattered. When it’s stuff like brands, digital rights, preserved foods etc, it really doesn’t.

    I’ve mentioned it before: we export more whisky than we do beef, lamb and dairy combined. And we export whisky everywhere. Do we determine law based on those farmers or let whisky distillers trump all of them? Are you going to sacrifice Lagavulin and Bell’s for some lambs and cheeses? Logic says not. And those businesses are less bothered about the EU than the farmers are.

    Like I’ve worked in global businesses and they were mostly leavers. The parking meter company loses their one customer in France? Well, not great, but they’ve got clients in the USA, South Africa, Saudi, Switzerland

  4. IF we get out, who will champion rejoining? It’s impossible to imagine. That’s why they must keep us in by fair means or foul.

    (Well, they tried fair and it didn’t work)

  5. An anyway, won’t she be pushing up chrysanthemums* in half that time?

    *Not common or garden daisies.

  6. “…unless the people have agreed it with a vote.”

    In the event of an acrimonious rerun, whatever the result, I think we can guarantee it will fester – and for more than a generation.

  7. It was festering amongst the 4m or so who voted for UKIP no-one else cared much. In fact there was much more call for a second referendum , than there ever was for the first . It was a matter of internal Conservative Party Politics largely.
    The question of immigration was a strongly felt one but as we are repeatedly assured Brexit is not about keeping Britain white …oh goodness me no.. its a constitutional question
    ( Laugh…I nearly started )

    My own wider family have been voting Conservative since the 60s but now chiefly identify with remain against the Forces of extreme Nationalist bigots and the useful,idiots and equally dim witted collectivism.
    This will be passed to our children

  8. Slightly O/T, the picture of Keir Starmer on the Sky News website looks like he is about to say “Suit you Sir! Ooh!”. Either that or he’s auditioning for the reboot of Max Headroom.

  9. bloke in spain,

    Festering for more than a generation is very much true.

    Our political task in our generation is to cast the abomination [national sovereignty] out, to cleanse the temple and to restore the worship of the divinity to whom the temple rightfully belongs. In plain terms, we have to re-transfer the prestige and the prerogatives of sovereignty from the fifty or sixty fragments of contemporary society to the whole of contemporary society – from the local national states by which sovereignty has been usurped, with disastrous consequences, for half a millennium, to some institution embodying our society as a whole.

    In the world as it is to-day, this institution can hardly be a universal Church. It is more likely to be something like a League of Nations. I will not prophesy. I will merely repeat that we are at present working, discreetly but with all our might, to wrest this mysterious political force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local national states of our world. And all the time we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands, because to impugn the sovereignty of the local national states of the world is still a heresy for which a statesman or a publicist can be – perhaps not quite burnt at the stake, but certainly ostracised and discredited.

    Arnold J Toynbee, The Trend of International Affairs Since the War, 1931

  10. Well despite the trolling from a well renowned Remainer on these boards, the first of the 6 existentially destructive crises for the EU appears to be moving into place. Reports from Algiers reveal mass protests against the corrupt military kleptocracy (rather than the corrupt bureaucracy of clipoard wielders in Brussels) – with the likely collapse of Algeria into Civil WWar and an expected 15 million refugees headed straight for France (including ISIS extremists) the EU will face existential peril in the next year. Add in the probable collapse of the Euro due to Global recession and it does not look too good for the organisation longer term.

  11. Well Gareth if the next decade teaches us anything it is surely that there was insufficient Nationalism in Europe in the 1930s

  12. Curiously, I find myself agreeing with Newmania here. The 30s were a continuation of the previous century. The process of subsuming disparate peoples into large national blocs. The unifaction of Italy. The unification of the German statelets. The EU’s the end point of that process. The unification of the entirety of Europe into one national bloc. So a Remainer belongs to the C19th & C20th.
    But the late C20th into the C21th has seen a different form of nationalism arise. Separatism. The drive to dismantle those big national blocs into something much closer to the people they serve. People wish to freed, not subjugated.
    Sorry, Newmania, you’re just behind the curve of history.

  13. Incidentally, the former Yugoslavia is a fine example of why the large nation model is a failure. It may have held disparate peoples together. But it didn’t bring disparate peoples together. As soon as Yugoslavia collapsed, the people who comprised it were at each other’s throats. And that may well foretell the future of the EU. Would the Catalan secessionists have arisen in a Spain not an economic victim of EU economic policies? Would the fission of Italy be such a real possibility?Of Belgium? If they weren’t subsumed in a supranational construction like the EU?

  14. Both German and Italian Nationalism were conceived as asserting the primacy of ethnic determination (the ethnic groups were sometimes real and sometimes more or less invented) – (Germany Germany over all- refers to the ethnic area of the Germans over each statelet )
    The movement is a direct development of 19th century Romantic nationalism as you say . It is an interesting thing that the “good” nationalism”, of, shall we say 1848 and the bad Nationalism of the 1930s are for many people quite separate phenomena but they are clearly part of the same thing. Mussolini was initially viewed with some approval by progressive opinion.

    Post War European cooperation is defined by and associated with and understandable revulsion against ethnic aggression in Europe as well as being an economic project around currency trade and “employment”. It has more in common with the Hapsburg Empire than with Mussolini and was precisely a reaction against Fascism. In fact it has often been the complaint of UK conspiracy theorists that the EU wished to undermine the ethnic bolck and encourage “regions”

    As Yoda would put nit , ” About face arse have it you ”

    I think I am out of sympathy with the times, given that our times venerate ignorance applaud bigotry and endeavor to bring about poverty, I`d certainly like to be .

  15. Its odd the Jeremy Starmer policy mish mash isn’t more criticised. Jeremy’s only clear point is that EU workers rights are a must have. But there’s a notable absence of journos asking the obvious question. Why, once out of the EU shouldn’t the UK decide what rights they want. It doesn’t matter if you cut and paste it from the EU rule book Jeremy, why no put it in your manifesto and let the electorate cast their opinion over it.? you know democracy.

  16. Newremainia

    This did make me sit up and take notice

    ‘I think I am out of sympathy with the times, given that our times venerate ignorance applaud bigotry and endeavor to bring about poverty, I`d certainly like to be .’

    There’s not sufficient typos really but dare I ask if you live in Ely by any chance?

  17. The Meissen Bison

    Polly doesn’t quite get it

    This is in all likelihood true for all possible definitions of the words “get” and “it”

  18. bloke in spain,

    I’ve often said I feel the EEC/EU is ultimately a cold war project. And it probably worked as a cold war project, but we aren’t in the cold war. Not many places to trade. Trade was about heavy, high-gravity goods and communications meant that putting people together in one place was important.

    Just look at companies today. I did work for a well-known high street chain. They own their own building. And their IT department is like the Marie Celeste now. Reason? They don’t need all these people doing IT under one roof. The internet means they outsourced pretty much everything to small suppliers and their IT team is mostly just handling those companies. The whole structure of companies has changed. Maybe we could organise all our cross-border agreements with people in offices in London making conference calls and sending PDFs around?

    And all our countries are based on wars over land and the mutual alliances to protect those. Other than some small islands, there’s no reason the UK should be the UK. 1200 years ago England was 7 countries.Are we expecting the Danes to invade and take arable land? Of course not. It’s not worth the blood and treasure any longer. What effect is that going to have?

    And this has effects. If we don’t need men in skirts to fight wars, maybe we don’t go transferring money to them.

    I mean, I remember how much overt patriotism there was when I was a kid and it’s gone. Things like the 4 nations football tournament, or the royal tournament, or Buy British campaigns. We do it today a bit, but it all feels rather phoney, like we can’t be too much about militarism or any sense of heritage, so it ends up being banal, urban, a sense of nationalism that many people don’t connect with.

  19. I think I am out of sympathy with the times, given that our times venerate ignorance…

    Corporal Newremainia Frazer is living proof of venerated ignorance.

  20. 1200 years ago England was 7 countries.

    True, but only 150 years ago Germany (and Italy) were each more than a dozen warring statelets. Not much of a modern fissiparous tendency in Germany, but plenty in Italy (and Spain and Belgium and …).

  21. Facepainter you shabby treasonous shite–how many times have you been told about posting while pissed?

    Really good about how those 4 million UKIP supporters managed to out vote all you remainiac scum though.

  22. Things like the 4 nations football tournament,

    No idea about soccer, but the 6 Nations seems to get plenty of attention in my world.

    or the royal tournament,

    Still happens, AFAIK, but you’re not likely to find it on the BBC. Anyone know, btw, what that first “B” is supposed to stand for?

    or Buy British campaigns.

    which will be legal again in 17 days, if the Quisling MPs are shown enough piano wire.

  23. – “It was festering amongst the 4m or so who voted for UKIP no-one else cared much.

    So 4m people are now happier and the rest, as you say, don’t care much?

    You’re describing Brexit as a win with no downside.

  24. Polly’s kinda right. May’s deal is dead, and tomorrow Parliament will prevent a no-deal Brexit. The next day they’ll vote to extend Article 50.

    And on and on it (pretending to leave) will go.

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