Tag: Brexit

Originally a comment by Claire on They’ve done it.

As an expat Brit, I was in two minds whether to vote in the referendum. After all, it seemed a bit cheeky to insist on a voice on it when I’d no intention of returning to the UK. But the rhetoric changed my mind. I quickly became very concerned that the Brexit campaign were willing to lie brazenly and hand-wave any demands for details on how any number of important structural changes would be managed. So I got registered and voted, for my nephews and nieces too young to vote, for my other family members who’s lives and job prospects depended on us remaining in the EU. It was not enough, but I was glad in the end that I had voted, because I would have felt so much worse if I had not.

As it is, I’m angry and scared about what’s happening to my home country. A portion of the population has always been given to Little Englandism and rosy-colored visions of a Britain that was not nearly as good as they make out (unless you were a well-off white man) and a nostalgia for a bygone Empire that is as grotesque as it is anachronistic. But I’d never before realized how widespread the attitude was.

I’m not starry-eyed about the EU, in fact I’ve been sharply critical of how they’ve dealt with problems such as the financial difficulties in Greece or the generally poor transparency of many of its institutions. But fixing those problems was achievable if Britain had only been willing to try and effect change. We weren’t the only country to want to see reform and could have sought partners to modernize the EU in a way that reflected the 21st century world.

The EU was built in part in the feverish hangover of WWII. We’d been through two unimaginably large and utterly preventable human catastrophes before we’d even made it halfway through the century. The EU came out of that desire not to descend into the madness a third time. But it brought all kinds of benefits none of us could have anticipated. The Remain campaign did not communicate these very effectively, and I think people like being angry at things more than they like respecting dull plodding things like diplomacy and technocratic progress. But working conditions for workers, especially at the low end of the income scale, were much improved by European laws and directives. All those people who voted for Brexit overwhelmingly came from those most likely to be hurt by the disappearance of those regulations.

The EU will survive our exit, I’m sure. We will be the poorer for it, and I don’t think it’s egotistical to say I think that we did make important contributions to the European project that will be missed in the future. But ultimately, leaving will hurt us way more.

So that’s appalling.

Brexit: MPs overwhelmingly back Article 50 bill

Well shame on those MPs.

MPs have voted by a majority of 384 to allow Prime Minister Theresa May to get Brexit negotiations under way.

They backed the government’s European Union Bill, supported by the Labour leadership, by 498 votes to 114.

But the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Liberal Democrats opposed the bill, while 47 Labour MPs and Tory ex-chancellor Ken Clarke rebelled.

Two nationalist parties opposed the hyper-nationalist Brexit – ain’t life strange. But then they’re minority-nation nationalist, so it’s not so strange after all. Ironic though? Yes I think we get to call it ironic.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn had imposed a three-line whip – the strongest sanction at his disposal – on his MPs to back the bill.

Shadow cabinet members Rachael Maskell and Dawn Butler quit the party’s front bench shortly before the vote, in order to defy his orders.

UK friends of mine are in despair.

Well, this seems like one unmistakably bad result of Brexit – UK scientists are being pushed out of projects because of worries about funding.

In a confidential survey of the UK’s Russell Group universities, the Guardian found cases of British academics being asked to leave EU-funded projects or to step down from leadership roles because they are considered a financial liability.

In one case, an EU project officer recommended that a lead investigator drop all UK partners from a consortium because Britain’s share of funding could not be guaranteed. The note implied that if UK organisations remained on the project, which is due to start in January 2017, the contract signing would be delayed until Britain had agreed a fresh deal with Europe.

In other words Brexit has slapped a huge handicap on UK scientists who want to collaborate with European colleagues.

Incidents reported by the universities suggest that researchers across the natural sciences, the engineering disciplines and social sciences are all affected. At least two social science collaborations with Dutch universities have been told UK partners are unwelcome, one Russell Group university said in the survey.

Speaking at Oxford’s Wolfson College last Friday, the university’s chancellor, Chris Patten, said Oxford received perhaps more research income than any European university, with about 40% coming from government. “Our research income will of course fall significantly after we have left the EU unless a Brexit government guarantees to cover the shortfall,” Lord Patten said.

The uncertainty over future funding for projects stands to harm research in other ways, the survey suggests. A number of institutions that responded said some researchers were reluctant to carry on with bids for EU funds because of the financial unknowns, while others did not want to be the weak link in a consortium. One university said it had serious concerns about its ability to recruit research fellows for current projects.

Yeah but at least they told Poland a thing or two, right? That’s worth all the tsuris, right?

A week after the referendum, science minister Jo Johnson told academics and industry figures he had raised concerns over potential discrimination against UK researchers with the EU science commissioner, Carlos Moedas. Johnson has asked a team at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to gather evidence for discrimination and urged organisations to report any incidents. Until the UK left the EU, he said the situation was “business as usual”.

Others see it differently. Joe Gorman, a senior scientist at Sintef, Norway’s leading research institute, said he believed UK industry and universities would see “a fairly drastic and immediate reduction in the number of invitations to join consortiums”.

Only 12% of bids for Horizon 2020 funds are successful, a rate that falls by more than half in highly competitive areas. Given the low probability of winning funds at the best of times, Gorman said it was natural risk aversion to be cautious of UK partners. In many cases, British organisations will not have a clue they have lost out. “If you don’t get invited to the party, you don’t even know there is a party,” he said.

It seems very clueless to me to call it “discrimination.” It’s not “ewwww, they’re British, they have cooties,” it’s a consequence of Brexit and its implications for funding.

“I strongly suspect that UK politicians simply don’t understand this, and think it is ‘business as usual’, at least until negotiations have been completed. They are wrong, the problems start right now,” he added. As a former European commission official, Gorman oversaw research projects and now advises universities and companies on how to succeed in EU-funded research programmes.

It’s almost as if complicated technical issues shouldn’t be decided by referendum.

Brian Cox says how Brexit is doubleplus ungood for science.

He thinks ongoing scientific research at all levels is vital. Which brings us, almost neatly, and inevitably, to Brexit — the elephant in every room, pub and Uber journey in the capital. Last weekend thousands of people marched from Trafalgar Square to Parliament to protest against the planned departure from the EU. I ask what effect Brexit will have on the amount of money available for research. “I promised myself I wouldn’t really talk about it,” he demurs. There’s a pause, before he quietly but convincingly does so.

“What you can say as a fact is that we receive more than a billion currency units a year. Pounds, euros, whatever it is, it’s about a billion,” he begins. “So the first question is what happens to that. It’s obviously a big hit to the university research base. That’s extremely problematic.” A member of the Royal Society’s staff points out that “10 per cent of university research funding comes from the EU”. Cox nods.

“Even more urgent is the position of EU nationals in our system,” he says. “Not only in lectureships and professorships but post-docs and students. All these things need addressing. But it’s not just science. There’s an enormous list.”

…

I suggest that British science might become isolated: unable to attract talent, its own talent unable to travel easily to foreign research posts. “Absolutely,” he nods. “When you look at my fields, particle physics and astronomy, it’s all about European and global collaboration. The European Space Agency, the European Southern Observatory, CERN. The “e” in CERN stands for Europe — our whole science infrastructure is European. The facilities we have are part of a much wider structure: one single country generally cannot afford to build large facilities on its own. It’s all about collaboration.”

And collaboration is quite a good thing, after all. It’s something to strive for. It’s a big improvement on war and fighting.

Nick Cohen explains how the Brexit campaign embraced xenophobia as the path to victory.

Vote Leave, the respectable campaign of those “progressive” Conservatives Michael Gove, Boris Johnson, Iain Duncan Smith, Andrea Leadsom and Chris Grayling, promised not to incite racial tension. Last October, it barely mentionedimmigration in its propaganda. In May, its officers tried to ban Nigel Farage from the airwaves, so wary were they of contamination.

For all that, Farage proved to be the Mephistopheles of the Tory leavers. He offered them victory in return for what paltry souls they possessed. Going hard on immigration was the only way to win, he said. After a glance at the polls, “progressive” Tories agreed. On 3 June, a triumphant Farage could boast that their conversion was the “turning point”; the moment when Ukip’s wining stance on immigration became “mainstream”. It is still not true to say that race and immigration were all that mattered to everyone who voted leave. But they were all that mattered to Vote Leave. Mainstream Tories accepted that creating and exploiting fear would take them to victory. They played with fire and you can hear the flames crackling.

And Nick doesn’t see any potential for a not so bad outcome.

Whatever choice Brexit forces on us, Ukip and forces to its right will prosper. They will be able to say to supporters old and new that they were lied to and betrayed. Either immigrants would still be coming or their grievance-filled followers would be getting poorer.

I cannot imagine better conditions for resentment to rise. A referendum that was meant to let “the people take control” and “restore trust” will have achieved the opposite. You do not need an over-active imagination to picture the threats to the safety of anyone who looks or is foreign that may follow.

Last week’s violence could just be the start. Naturally, not everyone will suffer. No one is going to vandalise the Hurlingham club or firebomb Fortnum & Mason. Johnson, Farage, Gove, Leadsom, Duncan Smith and Grayling will have played with fire safe in the knowledge that, whoever else burned, it would not be them.

They’re all right Jack.

George Szirtes comments on Brexit xenophobia. He’s an immigrant himself, one who has lived in the UK for 60 years. (What happened in Hungary in 1956? You know.)

It is not as if the xenophobia that so influenced the leave campaign as it moved from economics to immigration did not exist before – it exists everywhere and often in more virulent form. Indeed, it set the stage for the campaign, and those who had muttered in the wings were encouraged to come out and occupy it. The filthy messages to Poles, the graffiti on public buildings, are part of the same spectrum that saw the hooligans on a tram in Manchester threaten a man with the words: “You’re a fucking immigrant. Get off this tram.” And: “Immigrants get deported!”

…

And such things resonate well beyond these shores. There are plenty of politicians just waiting to echo the cry, Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders most overtly. Some, like Viktor Orbán in Hungary would simply ban immigrants getting on Hungarian trams in the first place.

I sometimes think – and am not alone in thinking – that we are turning the clock back and have been doing so for some time, that everywhere in Europe and the United States, and in Russia, indeed worldwide, people are busily turning clocks back. They think they are returning to a golden age when everything was better. The trouble is the clock says 1931, maybe even 1932.

That’s certainly what I keep thinking. Don’t people know how this went then? Do they really want that all over again?

There is generosity in this country. We are generous with little lies and have been suspicious of bigger ones but swallowed a few whoppers in this referendum campaign. It has been a filthy war if a phony one. Some are already retreating on their claims about the economy and about the procedures that will lead us back to those famous sunlit uplands.

Big lies work. States are fragile fabrics. We are more fragile at this point than at any time in my life here. As is Europe, partly because of us.

Big lies do work. They work for Trump and they worked for Brexit. Bad times.

Kirsty Hall has a stunningly good post on Brexit that tells me many things I didn’t know – in particular, how short the notice was and how horrifyingly inadequate the necessary informing of the voter was. Basically she says Cameron did this for his own selfish short-sighted political reasons, blithely assuming Leave would fail, and he did nothing whatever to prevent the Leave win or to prepare the country for that outcome. The Scottish referendum, she says, was far more carefully planned and executed.

But then Brexit was never about the whole of the UK and Gibraltar examining the issues and deciding what was best.

Because you simply cannot drill down into such a complex issue in that short amount of time. It is impossible.

And that is why such vitally important issues like what would happen to the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland in the event of Brexit were simply glossed over and ignored. No one had the time to process how things would actually WORK. There was no time to go over the details with a fine-toothed comb.

Over and over I heard from undecided people, ‘why are we being asked this, I don’t feel like I know enough about it, it’s all so complicated, how on earth do I decide what’s best?’

Nobody bothered to give the details.

During the Scottish independence referendum, the Scottish SNP government published Scotland’s Future, a document laying out how an independent Scotland would work and addressing issues such as finance, the EU, currency and other issues.

It was a 670 page document and published a whole 10 MONTHS before the referendum and it was meticulously analysed point-by-point by both voters and the press. It was very thoroughly put under the microscope and in the end found slightly wanting, mostly on the issues of currency and the ability of an independent Scotland to retain membership of the EU.

It was made abundantly clear to voters that it was a big decision and if they were going to vote for Yes For Change and risk destabilising their country, they had better be very sure.

In contrast, the Vote Leave campaign published one 16 page pdf manifesto on their website. Did you read it? I never even heard about it.

16 pages obviously isn’t nearly as many as 670, so clearly it wasn’t going to be as detailed as the Scottish document.

Then I looked at the thing and it’s all in VERY. BIG. WRITING. So I downloaded it. There are 1293 words in the entire document. That’s it. That’s all.

Wow. 1300 words. That’s column-length. That’s a fraction of a chapter of a book. That’s small.

There’s nothing in it, she says. It’s just assertions and buzzwords, no real information.

In my view, voters were extremely short-changed in being given the tools to understand what Brexit would mean for them and their lives.

Of course it didn’t help that whenever possible consequences were brought up, the Leave campaign screamed ‘scaremongering’.

But they were able to get away with that lousy behaviour because there wasn’t time to ask the hard questions. The press couldn’t ask for clarification over and over again as happened during the Scottish independence referendum. There was no time to dig.

Farage, Johnson and Gove were never held over the coals by a press demanding a detailed and comprehensive Brexit plan as the SNP government were during Indyref. It there had been time for that, it would have certainly quickly become apparent that there was no plan and that it was all smoke and mirrors.

Because there was no real Leave Brexit plan other than, ‘right, that’s it, we’re off!’ — a fact that has been made abundantly clear since Friday.

Honestly, I thought it was only the US that did things that irresponsibly.

There was also no plan for Brexit from the Remain side because this was simply never supposed to happen. David Cameron very clearly expected the country to simply rubberstamp a Remain vote.

He called this referendum for his own political advantage within the Conservative party. It was never about what was best for Britain and always about what was best for David Cameron and his control of the Conservative party.

He thought he’d found a clever way to shut up the bothersome Eurosceptics. Have a referendum, win, then forever be able to tell them, ‘oh too bad, so sad, the people have decided’ — boom, job’s a good ‘un.

The only plan was to win and then briskly move on.

5 minutes in the Commons — ‘you’ve all had your say, best thing for Britain but jolly good show and well done all, next business please.’

If you think that’s just my opinion, this is a quote from the Independent newspaper:

“In the words of his biographers Anthony Seldon and Peter Snowdon, the Prime Minister had three objectives when he called this vote: “to pacify Eurosceptic critics, neutralise UKIP, and take the EU off the front pages”.”

It was never about you or your country.

And then there’s the fact that they’re all going off on holiday in a few days.

I am putting the blame firmly back where it belongs. On David Cameron and the Tory party for agreeing to this sham of a referendum in the first place and then executing it so badly and with such undue haste.

They ran it with the same blithe, unthinking, patrician arrogance that made them call it in the first place. Anyone who made the decision to call the referendum and then to run it in such a ludicrously short period of time is not fit to serve in public office in this country and they should hang their heads in shame. They ran a referendum under false premises and defrauded the public.

When they decided that a hastily called and badly organised referendum would shut up the Eurosceptics and scupper UKIP, the Conservatives did not care one whit about the possible outcomes for Britain of an actual Brexit. Which is why none of the potentially devastating issues were as deeply and rigorously explored as they should have been. Issues like the effects on medical research, university education, our economy, our standing in the world or the potentially difficult political situations that could result in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Gibraltar.

What does all that matter compared to David Cameron’s career?

And then the first comment, by John Farndon, is a real smack in the eye:

You’ve hit the nail on the head, Kirsty. About the process, you’ll be equally appalled (but not surprised) to know that this referendum broke the EU guidelines on referendums which the UK signed up to in Venice in 2007 on three key counts.
1) Governments are explicitly instructed to provide detail information laying out all the implications of the vote in full detail long before campaigning begins, so that voters know fully what they’re voting for. This should be in all official languages plus all significant minority languages. This is not a matter of whim but a key requirement.
2) In a referendum initiated by the executive (ie the government), Parliament must make it absolutely clear well in advance the course of action it recommends to the public. Since 500 out of 650 MPs were in favour of remain, it should have been clear what they recommended.
3) The government must also make it very clear to the public whether the result is legally binding or simply consultative. Because they failed to do this, there was massive confusion, with many people voting ‘leave’ just as a protest, safe in the belief that it would never actually happen. And now they say they cannot reject the verdict because many people believed it was binding and it would be wrong to deny the ‘will of the people’ which it clearly isn’t. !!!

You are absolutely right to castigate Cameron for his appalling overconfidence and chicanery in setting this referendum up so badly. But where was Parliament, where were the civil servants and legal advisors who must know all this better than me — who should have been there when the bill went through, when Cameron announced it, etc. Where was even the parliamentary committee which should have overseen this, the biggest single vote in recent British history? Parliament as a whole and its legal advisers have been so negligent it takes one’s breath away.

And now they are walking away from the calamity, washing their hands and saying, “Oh well, the people have spoken. It’s not our fault if it all comes crashing down.” Well, yes, it is. Parliament’s entirely. We expect our elected representatives to guide us in the right direction — which they utterly failed to do.

It’s a horror show.

Charlie Hebdo on Brexit:

The Guardian a couple of days ago on the frenzy of hatred after Brexit:

True Vision, a police-funded hate-crime-reporting website, has seen a 57% increase in reportingbetween Thursday and Sunday, compared with the same period last month. This is not a definitive national figure – reports are also made directly to police stations and community groups – but Stop Hate UK, a reporting charity, has also seen an increase, while Tell Mama, an organisation tackling Islamophobia anti-Muslim hatred, which usually deals with 40-45 reports a month, received 33 within 48-72 hours.

In Great Yarmouth, Colin Goffin, who is vice-principal of an educational trust, was told about taunts and jeers being directed at eastern European workers by 10am on Friday morning – just hours after the results of the referendum had been announced. Goffin went to see a Kosovan-born friend, the manager of a car wash, to discuss the vote. In the Norfolk coastal town, 72% had voted to leave.

“I wanted him to know that I didn’t agree with the decision, or the way that the issue of immigration had been used in the campaign,” Goffin says. But when he arrived, the abuse against the multinational staff had already begun. “He told me people were slowing down to laugh at his staff, wave and mouth ‘goodbye’,” Goffin says. “They had clearly not wasted any time in deciding to be hateful.”

It’s “community cohesion” in action.

Reports of xenophobia and racism have piled up in the media: the firebombing of a halal butchers in Walsall, graffiti on a Polish community centre in London and laminated cards reading: “No more Polish vermin” apparently posted through letterboxes in Huntingdon. Asked about the rise in hate crimes during PMQs on Wednesday, David Cameron said the government would be publishing a hate-crime action plan.

You see why I object to the word “vermin” in party rhetoric? You see why I do not give a flying fuck that Nye Bevan said it in 1948? Or rather that I do give a flying fuck, and think he was wrong to do so, and that no one should cite his example as if that made it ok. “Vermin” is genocidal language.

Why this sudden explosion? Paul Bagguley, a sociologist based at the University of Leeds, points to the gleeful tone of the racism: “There is a kind of celebration going on; it’s a celebratory racism.” With immigration cited in polls as the second most common reason in voting for Brexit, “people are expressing a sense of power and success, that they have won,” he says.

“People haven’t changed. I would argue the country splits into two-thirds to three-quarters of people being tolerant and a quarter to a third being intolerant. And a section of that third have become emboldened. At other times, people are polite and rub along.”

In other words the racists are mostly “silenced” – and that’s a good thing.

Bagguley says that what makes the recent attacks unusual is who they are directed at. Central to the anti-EU discourse in the media over the past decade has been a sense of British people being fundamentally different from Europeans. As Scottish politics and identity moved in a new direction, this mutated into a white English nationalism “that has a resonance with racial ways of thinking”, he says.

“This has been the bedrock and basis for this xenophobia, directed at everybody who is a little different. It is unlike the backlash after terrorist attacks, which targeted Irish people in the 70s, or Muslims and those thought to be Muslims, more recently. It is a very generalised kind of racism oriented against any groups perceived not to be in that narrow category of white English identity.”

Of course. You have Britain, and The Continong. Proper people, and bloody foreigners. Us, and the barbarians. The plucky little island, and that mongrel colony over there.

Woolley is clear, as is Tell Mama, that hate crimes have never gone away. Tell Mama’s annual report, released on Wednesday, states that anti-Muslim hatred reported to them rose by a staggering 326% in 2015. Women, especially those who wear hijabs or niqabs, bear the brunt of this. Hope Not Hate points out that it has been arguing for some time that far-right extremism is not getting the attention it deserves. Yet the Brexit-inspired racism seems slightly different in that slurs are focused on ethnicity over religion.

For the moment. The focus can shift back and forth according to what’s in the news, but there’s always someone to hate.

According to Andrew Grice in the Independent (and he’s not the only one), Brexit is all about Boris Johnson’s personal ambition. It’s amazing how just one person can fuck up everything in sight.

In killing Boris’s bid, the Justice Secretary has delivered the justice that Boris deserved. Johnson’s personal ambition got the better of him. He used to tell friends that he wanted to not just run Britain but “the world”; he was only half-joking.

But what a price the whole country has paid for that ambition; our EU membership has probably been sacrificed for it. The Leave camp would probably not have won without Boris as their front man.

“I am not an Outer,” he told some fellow Tory MPs  shortly before coming  out for Brexit. Many Tories – David Cameron included – are convinced it was a cold, calculated career decision. That he didn’t really believe in Brexit, he just believed in Boris. Now, incredibly, Boris has walked away from the scene of his unforgivable crime and left others to clear up the mess.

Oh well. No biggy.

The BBC looks at the things the Leave campaign said that, as soon as the vote was in, they said were not true. (You might think the short word for that would be “lies.” I couldn’t possibly comment.)

Immigration

The campaign claim: Immigration levels could be controlled if the UK left the EU. This would relieve pressure on public services.

The current claim: Immigration levels can’t be radically reduced by leaving the EU. Fears about immigration did not influence the way people voted.

Reality Check verdict: During the campaign, some Leave campaigners sent a clear message that the referendum was about controlling immigration. Some are now being more nuanced, saying the UK’s decision to leave the EU would not guarantee a significant decrease in immigration levels.

Immigration was the key issue of the EU referendum campaign, and Vote Leave’s focus on it was a key part of their strategy.

So that would be a lie then.

There’s a good deal more. All of it points in the direction of the Leave campaign’s having told whoppers.

Contributions to the EU budget

The campaign claim: We send £350m a week to Brussels, which could be spent on the NHS instead.

The current claim: The claim was a mistake, and we will not be able to spend that much extra on the NHS.

Reality Check verdict: Some of those who campaigned for Leave are now distancing themselves from this claim. Some have gone as far as admitting that it had been a mistake.

But not so far as admitting that it had been a lie. It sure looks like a lie though, given the big slogans on buses and then the “We never!”s on Friday.

The Leave campaign said the UK could eat its cake and still have it. After the election it said that once you eat your cake it’s gone, but they were going to try to persuade the EU to let the UK (or England and Wales) eat its cake and still have it anyway, in defiance of people’s usual disinclination to take possession of digested cake.

If you want to see David Tennant reading some of those tweets at Donald Trump (though sadly not the Cheeto-faced shitgibbon one), here’s Samantha Bee’s scathing take on Brexit:

It’s this kind of thing. A tram in Manchester.

Originally a comment by Maureen Brian on Whether nationalism is really the fever and liberalism the normal condition.

Sorry, John, but you can’t understand the present without understanding how we got here. The British Archipelago is at the edge of a vast continent which stretches from Japan to the Atlantic coast of Europe. It has a temperate climate and is endowed with a variety of natural resources.

Therefore it is a place that people might want to get to. It is also a place where it would be inevitable that the natural movements of people would have to stop, regroup and develop the technologies to move further because no-one arrived here who was able to walk on water, let alone do it for three thousand miles to get to the next place which was similarly endowed with the means of survival, the Americas.

So, at the end of the last ice age when the whole place had been covered in several kilometres thick of ice, say 10,000 years ago, there were no inhabitants at all. Every last one of us here today is the descendant of “immigrants” the first of whom crossed the land bridge between England and what is now France and the Low Countries to hunt during the summer and later to settle as the climate improved. Among those peoples were the ones who brought us agriculture, which was not developed here, linked us into trade routes across the continents, brought new materials and new technologies.

Some have theorised that all of this may be why we industrialised first but that’s a whole library of books you’d never read so let us move on.

I have no idea where you are on the planet but i’m pretty sure you can’t prove that all your ancestors were within a day’s walk from there even 1,000 years ago. I have evidence of one strand of my ancestry in a particular place, where I don’t live now, dating back to 937 CE, but that is about as far back as anyone can go unless you are part of a royal family in a literate society. I repeat, we are all immigrants. We all descend from species which arose in the Rift Valley of eastern Africa and we all moved about.

You seem to misunderstand the entire system for dealing with the new people arriving. Refugees, a term with a legal definition, and asylum seekers are housed, sometimes in pretty grotty conditions, and get just over £30 a week which is not even subsistence. Now some get their paperwork sorted out quickly but others stay in that limbo for up to 10 years. They hate it but are all agreed that it’s better than being dead.

The sudden arrival of much greater numbers of people seeking work, which almost all find, does of course put stresses and strains on the system. Sometimes their appearance causes a small war e.g.Darfur but this is not inevitable or usual. Besides, it’s what we pay governments to manage, though some do it better than others.

If you have evidence and can give me a link to it of vast numbers of people arriving here, claiming every known benefit and staying that way for years then let me, let us all see it. More common, as it has been for centuries, is that those who were here earlier exploit, underpay and abuse the newcomers.

Among the ones I’ve known personally are a couple of doctors, a high-powered lawyer with a sideline in journalism and a professor of physics. What we should worry about is that so few of them get to work at the level of which they are capable, often because of racial and religious prejudice. We should also worry, surely, about the fact that so many people are displaced now because of continued imperialist wars. The Chilcot Report is due out in a couple of weeks – see that for why many of those moving right now are Iraqis and Syrians.

You sneer at me for seeking to understand what is going on and wave the spectre of the far right at me. I’m glad I have enough grasp of history and of human beings not to be fooled by the appalling guff they talk and to resist the violence which they actively promote. I’m glad I have the sense to know that fascism and its little brothers were never defeated by agreeing with them, something you seem only too willing to do.

There are times when you can’t beat having long conversations with people who have numbers tattooed on their inner arms and veterans of the International Brigades. You’ll have to find another source, though, because those opportunities are almost gone.

There was this:

“How did you vote?” said Pooh.

“Leave,” said Piglet.

“I voted remain,” said Pooh.

“Are we still friends?” said Piglet.

“Yes…yes we’re still friends,” said Pooh.

“Good,” said Piglet. “Let’s go and get pissed.”

Jennie Stevenson tweaked it slightly.

“How did you vote?” said Pooh.

“Leave,” said Piglet.

“I voted remain,” said Pooh.

“Are we still friends?” said Piglet.

“Well to be honest, I’m not really sure” said Pooh, uncharacteristically thoughtfully. “It’s a complex issue and not really one that can be reduced to seven lines of text for the purposes of a rather twee meme.

“On the one hand, a belief in unity, that we’re stronger together, and that when we work as a team we both benefit, was one of the main reasons why I voted as I did.

“On the other hand, whilst I appreciate that, just as I did, you chose your vote based on what you thought was for the best, you have precipitated a huge financial collapse, destabilised my country, and threatened the future of my children, and it’s hard for me to forget that, especially within a matter of hours.

“It’s entirely possible that we’re going to end up with a very much depleted Sixty Acre Wood, and while you might have no issue with the other animals who live here, you sided with those who did. As of yesterday, Kanga’s had to go into hiding, Rabbit’s marching to Christopher Robin’s house demanding her immediate repatriation, and Tigger’s had donkey shit shoved through his letterbox. While you might not have wanted that, you legitimised it, and decided that other animals’ lives and security were collateral damage.

“It’s true that you’re still the small, massively overmarketed stuffed animal that you were before, but realistically I’ve seen another side of you that I hadn’t before and it’s going to take me some time to process that.

“And whenever I tried to discuss this with you beforehand, you either accused me of scaremongering or insisted on ignoring me and showing me pictures of cats instead.

“So rather than pressing me for assurances I’m in no position to make right now, I’d appreciate it if you could give me some space and allow me to get off my face on honey and grieve the future that I thought I had, which has been destroyed in the favour of the one that you’ve dragged me into.

“And if you don’t, I’ll post you to Cameron. All right?”

Remember the conclusion of Dorothy Parker’s review of Winnie the Pooh? “Tonstant Weader frowed up.”

Meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn sacked Hilary Benn in the middle of the night and many Labour MPs have quit the shadow cabinet in response, while the BBC is reporting that Corbyn sabotaged the Remain campaign.

Interesting times.

The latest update from the Guardian:

Writing for the Guardian, Phil Wilson – the chair of the Labour in for Britain group – has called on Jeremy Corbyn to resign, claiming he sabotaged the party’s remain campaign.

[Corbyn] himself issued a note to all MPs on 17 September 2015 telling them that Labour would campaign to remain in the European Union. And yet he decided to go on holiday in the middle of the campaign. He did not visit the Labour heartlands of the north-east and instead raised esoteric issues such as TTIP which had no resonance on the doorstep.

This leads to me to the greatest betrayal and the final straw for many MPs. I have been told and shown evidence by an overwhelming number of unimpeachably neutral Labour remain staff that Corbyn’s office, for which he must take full responsibility, consistently attempted to weaken and sabotage the Labour remain campaign, in contravention of the party’s official position.

There’s a public Facebook album of screengrabs of xenophobic or racist bullying.

There is much, much more.