The Guardian: The paranoid fantasy behind Brexit

The other crucial idea here is the vertiginous fall from “heart of Empire” to “occupied colony”. In the imperial imagination, there are only two states: dominant and submissive, coloniser and colonised. This dualism lingers. If England is not an imperial power, it must be the only other thing it can be: a colony. And, as Deighton successfully demonstrated, this logic can be founded in an alternative English history. The moment of greatest triumph – the defeat of the Nazis – can be reimagined as the moment of greatest humiliation – defeat by the Nazis. The pain of colonisation and defeat can, in the context of uneasy membership of the EU, be imaginatively appropriated. (Boris Johnson, in the Telegraph of 12 November, claimed that “we are on the verge of signing up for something even worse than the current constitutional position. These are the terms that might be enforced on a colony.”)[...]

Why, then, were there no photographs of Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl holding hands at the Brandenburg Gate to match the pictures of Kohl and François Mitterrand at Verdun in 1984? Because Thatcher literally carried in her handbag maps showing German expansion under the Nazis. This was a mental cartography that English conservatism could not transcend – the map of a Europe that may no longer exist in reality, but within which its imagination remains imprisoned. “Europe,” Barnett writes, “moved on from the second world war and Britain didn’t.” One might go so far as to say that England never got over winning the war. [...]

The sleight of hand was not subtle: Hitler tried to unite Europe, so does the EU, therefore the EU is a Hitlerian project. But the lack of subtlety did not stop the trope from being used in the Brexit campaign: “Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this [unifying Europe], and it ends tragically. The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods,” Boris Johnson told the Telegraph on 14 May 2016, a month before the referendum. That Napoleon and “various people” were not the point of the argument became clear in Johnson’s reiteration of the real point: that the EU was “pursuing a similar goal to Hitler in trying to create a powerful superstate”. While Harris was writing Fatherland in 1990, the British secretary of state for trade and industry, Nicholas Ridley, a close friend and ally of the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, told the Spectator that the European monetary system being introduced by the EU was “all a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe … I’m not against giving up sovereignty in principle, but not to this lot. You might as well give it to Adolf Hitler, frankly … I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather have the shelters and the chance to fight back than simply being taken over by economics.” [...]

Yet the paper went on to contrast the fate of Britain since the war with that of the six members of the existing common market, all of whom had been invaded: “The contrast between their experiences in recent years as members of the Communities, and ours outside, when our resources have not been growing sufficiently to do all we should like to do at home and abroad, suggests that they chose the right road … All the Community countries enjoyed rates of growth of gross national product (GNP) per head of population, or of private consumption per head, roughly twice as great as Britain’s.” It was not entirely ridiculous at some subliminal level to see these two things – being invaded and growing twice as fast as the country that wasn’t – as cause and effect. The “right road” to prosperity did not seem to lie through successful self-defence – on the contrary, invasion worked well for the six.

read the article or listen to the podcast

The Atlantic: The Changing Ways Parents React to Their Kids Coming Out of the Closet

When Mary Robertson, a sociologist at California State University at San Marcos, interviewed adolescents at an LGBTQ youth center, she was expecting to hear echoes of these stories. Yet the conversations surprised her: While the teens’ lives were far from perfect or conflict-free, they weren’t the tragedies she expected. In some instances, when some kids had come out, their parents in turn came out to them as bisexual. Some were pleasantly surprised by the lack of family drama their revelation caused, despite having worried about getting kicked out of their homes.[...]

Mary Robertson: They were expecting anger. More than one of them expected that they were going to get kicked out of their families, or at the minimum, for it to be a family crisis. And I think some of the most profound findings in the study were hearing from young people who said, “My coming-out story isn’t a tragedy.” That just shows that the expectation is absolutely that it’s going to be bad.[...]

Robertson: It’s important to think about the fact there was no LGBTQ movement prior to the 1970s. It’s a relatively recent thing that we call each other “gay” or “straight.” We’ve been able to kind of see and watch this thing happen in our lifetimes. For the parents of the kids I spoke to, they really didn’t grow up in the context of an LGBTQ movement. But for this generation of kids, it was common parlance. Just that difference of having it be part of your world has a really profound influence on young people today. It broadens the options of how you can name your sexual identity. If [LGBTQ identities are] not even in your realm of thinking or perspective, it’s really that much harder to imagine yourself as a gay person. [...]

Robertson: The study included black, Latino, and white people, and there didn’t seem to be that presence of homophobia based on race. I thought that was profound, that there wasn’t a racialized story about homophobia. I do think that it’s kind of similar to the idea of the rural-urban divide. If you scratch the surface a little bit, I don’t think that’s the story.

read the article

Politico: Warning signs mount for Trump reelection bid

Unlike most of his predecessors, he’s been persistently unpopular, with approval ratings mired in the 40-percent range — so far, he’s the only president in the modern era whose job approval ratings have never been over 50 percent, according to Gallup.

Some of Democrats’ biggest gains came in the states that powered Trump’s Electoral College victory in 2016: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And while a president’s base has stayed home in previous midterm elections, leading to losses, the record turnout in this year’s races suggests 2018 was more like a 2016 re-run than Trump voters standing on the sidelines. [...]

Barack Obama’s Democratic Party lost 63 House seats and 6 Senate seats in 2010, but Obama defeated former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in 2012. Republicans flipped both the House, where they netted 52 seats, and Senate in 1994, but Bill Clinton slaughtered former Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) in 1996. Ronald Reagan’s GOP lost 26 House seats in 1982 — and picked up a seat in the Senate — but Reagan nearly swept the Electoral College against former Vice President Walter Mondale two years later, winning a 49-state landslide.

read the article

Independent: An unexpected new group, Brexiteers against Brexit, threatens Theresa May’s plan

We have gone through the looking-glass to a world in which Philip Hammond, the chancellor and leading Remainer, said this morning we would be better off outside the EU, while a new movement of Brexiteers against Brexit has sprung up to argue, in effect, that we might as well stay in the EU.[...]

The prime minister and her small band of loyalists, now reinforced by another Remainer-for-Brexit, Amber Rudd, will argue that the backstop would be “mutually uncomfortable”. The UK government wouldn’t like the European Court of Justice having a say over parts of the Northern Ireland economy; while EU27 governments think British, especially Northern Irish, companies would have an unfair advantage because they would not be bound enough by EU law. [...]

Then there is the option of postponing Brexit while we have another referendum. Johnson and Raab ought to vote for that, but they won’t, and I still don’t think there are enough pro-EU MPs who would back it if they could have May’s deal instead. Once a final-say referendum has been defeated, the only options left would be May’s deal or leaving without a deal, and we know which way most MPs ought to go on that, even if we can’t be sure they will.

read the article

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell: End of Space – Creating a Prison for Humanity

Space travel is the most exciting adventure for humanity, but in an irony of history we may stop ourselves from going into space the more we do it. With every rocket launched we are creating a deadly trap for mankind.

Deutsche Welle: Opinion: Gibraltar dispute shows the absurdity of Brexit

Sanchez does have a point. The future arrangement for the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland is a prominent issue in ongoing Brexit talks and the deadline for reaching a final agreement has been postponed to 2020.

Yet, the border between the British peninsula of Gibraltar and Spain has not featured in the Brexit talks, and nobody knows what will happen to the 10,000 Spanish workers who commute to Gibraltar every day when Britain leaves the EU. [...]

It is possible that the border between the British peninsula and the Spanish mainland could be temporarily closed, like between 1969 and 1985. It is one of the reasons the vast majority of Gibraltar residents voted in favor of Britain remaining in the EU. [...]

The fight over Gibraltar illustrates the utter madness that is Brexit – irrespective of all the bureaucratic efforts being made to achieve a workable split. Leaders attending the upcoming EU summit on Sunday will wave through a Brexit plan that simply postpones reaching a final agreement on numerous contentious issues.

read the article

New Europe: The inconvenient truth about Saudi Arabia

What makes the truth inconvenient is Saudi Arabia’s strategic importance. The Kingdom still accounts for over 10% of global oil output. Its sovereign wealth fund sits on an estimated $500 billion. Saudi Arabia is the most influential Sunni Arab country, occupying a special role within the Muslim world, owing to its role as the custodian of Islam’s holiest sites. It is central to any policy of confronting Iran. [...]

Israel, too, has indicated support for MBS, owing to his willingness to move in the direction of normalizing relations and, more important, the two countries’ shared interest in countering Iranian influence in the region. And US President Donald J. Trump’s administration is standing by its man, so far refusing to acknowledge his role in Khashoggi’s murder and resisting calls for sanctions against Saudi Arabia.[...]

Consultations should also be held with China and Russia. Unlike the US, both have working relationships with Saudi Arabia and Iran, which gives both a stake in preventing such a war from starting and shutting it down quickly if it does.

read the article

The Guardian: From Trump to Boris Johnson: how the wealthy tell us what ‘real folk’ want

But when rightwing populists focus on elites they are mostly referring to culture. Their targets are filmmakers, actors, lecturers, journalists, “globalists”, spiritualists, scientists and vegans; the Clintons, Hollywood, Londoners, New Yorkers, Silicon Valley, Sussex and Berkeley. These are the people the right claim are responsible for shaping what people can see or hear, and limiting what they can say. They pillory opinion-formers for looking down on “ordinary people” as being ignorant, bigoted and uncouth. And they are always careful to invent “ordinary people” in their own image. John Kerry’s windsurfing or Barack Obama’s taste for arugula are emphasised as evidence of their lack of connection to basic values. Laying claim to “the real America” or “commonsense values”, they evoke a mythical, homogenous people and culture, only to claim it is being besieged by cosmopolitans, multiculturalists and immigrants. Through what Sarah Igo, in The Averaged American, describes as “the strange slippage between the typical and the good, the average and the ideal”, what masquerades as an embrace of “ordinary folk” is ultimately exposed as an appeal to an ethnically pure, culturally uniform “volk”. [...]

With that conceded and, hopefully, addressed, the left is in a far more solid place to expose and challenge the disingenuousness, hypocrisy and inadequacy of the culture-warriors on three main counts. First, their prescriptions don’t work. Britain does not feel like a stronger, more confident place since it voted to leave the European Union, but more divided, lost and lonely than anyone can remember. It didn’t put the great back into Great Britain but the little into Little England. In short, it has proved an inadequate balm for the post-imperial melancholy so many were apparently experiencing. Denying Muslims and migrants their civil rights or women their reproductive rights doesn’t give other groups more rights. When terrorists kill fewer people than toddlers with guns and are more likely to be white and American than brown and foreign, the threat to your “way of life” is the way you are living it. [...]

Finally, all too often the rightwing cheerleaders for these “ordinary folk” are more embedded in the elites than those they attack can ever be. When George W Bush, who is teetotal, is the man you’d most like to have a drink with, an Old Etonian Bullingdon boy like Boris Johnson is able to get away with posing as a man of the people, and Trump can get the modern equivalent of $140m from his dad and still claim he is a self-made man, something is seriously wrong.

read the article

statista: How Many British Euromyths Has The EU Debunked?

When it comes to reporting new legislation planned by the European Union, many British tabloids have a tendency to "overdo it". A story from September 1994 is a notable example. Reported by The Sun, Daily Mirror, Daily Mail and Daily Express, it stated that "Brussels bureaucrats banned curved bananas with shops ordered not to sell fruit which is too small or abnormally bent". The Commission debunked the story and responded that regulation simply classifies bananas according to quality and size for the sake of easing international banana trade. It added that the minimal rules are applied solely to green, unripe bananas, rather than those destined for the processing industry. It should also improve the quality of bananas on sale in the EU.

In fact, the Commission maintains a webpage solely devoted to debunking "Euromyths" reported by the British press. The banana example is just one of hundreds of myths and others include "Commission to outlaw mushy peas (1995)" and "Queen's corgis to be outlawed (2002)". The number of false stories about the EU reported in the UK reached its height in 1993 with the Commission listing 100 myths in total. The number fell drastically between 2007 and 2012 but it started to climb again in 2013 after Prime Minister David Cameron announced that a Conservative government would hold an in-or-out referendum on EU membership. You can find the European Commission page wth the full A-Z index of Euromyths here.

see the graph