I was delighted to attend a superb event hosted by Professor Anand Menon of UK in a Changing Europe. Even more delighted to meet Michel Barnier and present him with copies of the books Reboot Britain and Private Eyelines.
Here are my takeaways from the event. It was necessary to attend in person to gain the full value of the conversation between these two giants. Just click the link to Twitter below or go direct to the the full article on Linkedin.
— Reboot Britain – Rage Against The Brexit Machine (@BrexitRage) February 3, 2023
Merci beaucoup pour tout ce que vous avez fait pour essayer de sauver notre pays de lui-même. Le Brexit est perdant. Nous allons nous réveiller doucement.
Life long Tory voter Rod Stewart has just declared that the country is a mess and the Tories need to hand over power to someone more competent. This prompted me to think of the song he covered on his Atlantic Crossing album. Apologies for the lyrical changes which are occasionally grating !! 🙂
Some will know that, in 2016, Britain voted to become an isolated country via the Brexit vote. The marginal 52:48 popular vote was pumped up by:
Outlandish promises that we would fund our healthcare system with the proceeds of Brexit.
Brexit ‘freedoms’ from EU laws, 98% of which Britain helped to make.
The weaponisation of migrants ‘swarming’ into the UK, using the very same language used by the Nazis to justify the Holocaust.
It then took five years to leave our membership of the club we call the European Union, mostly because nobody in our Government could agree what Brexit meant. Some wanted total isolation with free market capitalism on steroids, a kind of ‘Singapore on Thames’. Others wished to retain all the benefits of trade and co-operation from Europe without any of the responsibilities of club membership. The battle raged on between the various factions, consuming four Prime Ministers in the process, with our fifth currently sitting in the departure lounge. Ultimately, it seems that Brexit consumes all its offspring.
Two years on from our departure, it is possible to see the beginnings of the realities of Brexit. In this film, I have taken what could be described as a ‘Brexit Stock Take’. This piece deals with the economic realities of Brexit. Others in the series will deal with Social effects, Political futures, Legal outcomes, Environmental impacts and Technological effects.
Please take a look at the film and subscribe to our EU TUBE channel. The film is 17 minutes long but well worth your time as a case study in populism which is sweeping Brazil, the USA, India, Russia and several other places. Paradoxically, the world needs collaborative leadership and joined up thinking to face climate change and the many other global issues we must address if we are to survive. Instead, many think that ‘strong men’ are the answers to such problems. We shall see who prevails.
Michael and Alan are angry about Brexit. So they have decided to turn their fire on me in their own version of the ‘Daily Mail v Prince Harry’ moment. I had published a post about my books on Rebooting Britain in response to a facebook post by Led By Donkeys. Alan immediately tries to ‘look for a motive for my crime’ and assumes incorrectly that writing books on Brexit is a money spinner. That’s the only reason he can come up with, based on zero knowledge of how publishing works:
Later on, Alan runs away when asked about the benefits of Brexit. Again this is typical in an online exchange and is one of the reasons why I don’t bother with online Brexorcisms, except when I need some entertainment.
End of communication
Get copies of the books by clicking the page above
Michael is made of stronger stuff. He wants free copies of my books, but he is not a reviewer, a media person or anyone with reach and influence. He finds it hard to understand why I refuse to give 6 months of work away for free to someone with no track record or profile. This trait is not just reserved for Brexiteers. I know plenty of Remainers that refuse to learn the skills needed to change the game. On the one hand they are happy to buy badges and tat and pay Andrew Adonis et al for their writing, they are affronted when I ask that they value my efforts. Oh well. So much for not being an elitist. No wonder we lost three times.
Michael pleads for the book whilst simultaneously pointing out that he already knows what’s in it. Some of our chat on facebook is out of chronological order in what follows below, but I think you will get the gist of Michael’s beef.
It was emotional Michael. Learn the skills of Brexorcism here.
From Don Adamson, Brexorcist in Chief from Yorkshire.
This week’s quotes: “excess deaths have shown a marked increase in the UK … difficulty accessing emergency care is adding to avoidable deaths in the UK … Murdoch’s TalkTV is regularly recording zero audience … Murdoch has spent millions … £50M for barely viewed presenter Piers Moron alone … Johnson inherited the longest ever waiting lists and social care vacancies ever … Brexit making vacancies harder to fill … worrying reductions in the life expectancies of women … Johnson made bold promises that were never likely to succeed … no chance of delivering the 2019 Mandate and they know it … a massive lie … Scumbag has two years to deliver on Johnson’s health fantasies … Scumbag banking his future on delivering the impossible … clinical staff silenced on issues that could save lives … we will see avoidable deaths mount this winter … delay and obfuscation … staff shortages … morale rock bottom … a horrible winter awaits … Johnson’s serial dishonesty … Thick Lizzie’s fiscal recklessness … disastrous … the sense of respite is overdone … Scumbag has some qualities but many flaws … the relief is damning. Competence ought to be a given not an ambition … stability is nowhere near enough … Britain is still below pre Pandemic levels of output … the taboo that Tories are unlikely to think rationally about Brexit is unlikely to end … quickly bounced into making promises … tin ear .. tax status of his wife … talk of Tory unity is wildly premature … reappointment of Sue Ellen Braverman … is a victory of expediency over ability … this is before the real pain bites … a grim saga of high inflation and rising interest rates … his personal wealth is a lightning rod for voter discontent … tragedy … expectations so reduced that not imploding is the sign of a grown up … dysfunction … slow growth … inability to talk honestly about Brexit … economic indicators flashing red … cartoon radicalism … primary qualification is loyalty not ability … billions need to be found to balance the books … Tories have devolved a taste for sacrifice … defensive move by a PM whose party is ungovernable, may backfire … by promoting Braverman Scumbag damages his own reputation … politically naive … Scumbag’s ascendancy was more rapid than it should have been … Scumbag is a cause of the problem … tidy up a mess that he helped create … when the Tories erred in recent years Scumbag … always in favour of the mistake … supported Brexit … supported an extraordinary solution to the problem (Johnson) … can be put down to cynicism … support for Quixotic policy is the norm for Scumbag … governs in party interest rather than national interest … little evidence that Scumbag will challenge vested interests … inexperience, even with copious intelligence, is always a problem … Tories had nowhere else to turn … Scumbag does not mark a change from failed policies, he personifies them … The rot in Tory Party did not begin with Thick Lizzie … Brexit, which Scumbag supports, is the handbrake on country’s economic prospects …Johnson’s chaotic reign … more ruin … Tory failure to challenge its supporters does so much damage to the country … Richy Scumbag’s career in exploitative finance makes him unfit to be PM … will soon deploy the logic that made him rich to justify making millions of people poorer … 90% of schools face bankruptcy … catastrophic NHS failure … Scumbag has made money out of manipulating money, profited from the bankruptcy of others, ruthlessly exploited the leniency of regulators … the great Tory failed experiment in populism made the richest politician in Britain PM. Enriching the rich was ultimately what Brexit was about… British manufacturing is reeling from Brexit idiocy … the way successive administrations have gone about implementing Brexit has made things worse… manufacturing is particularly vulnerable to Brexit … cost of red tape at borders is £7B per year (government figures) … Germany now attracts more Japanese firms than the UK … decline of the car industry in the last six years … it has collapsed … new models are all going to be built abroad … Brexit problems made worse by government incompetence … it gets worse … Brigit industry is having to spend billions more … ever more ridiculous deadlines … Brexiter fantasy … Rees Mogg’s absurd law … grim picture … Brexit has done absolutely nothing to help … huge amount of damage … no sign that government recognises the problem … even 2016 Leave Voters know this is a bare faced lie … Chaos … scandal upon scandal … shutting down rather than answering legitimate problems … Richy Scumbag …. thick streak of selfishness … integrity holed below the waterline on day one … barely answers a single question … preferring bluster and evasion … no parliamentary accountability … total contempt for it … Scumbag is in the Johnson – Trump camp for standards … years of chaos and uncertainty … UK needs stability and competence … PM’s choice is save the economy or save Brexit … the absence of agreed plans hangs over government … an appallingly irresponsible fiscal event … it is not possible to make Brexit work … businesses are moving from Britain … not Project Fear, Project Reality … by far the biggest destructor is the fallout from Brexit … Scumbag’s cabinet … very few have real ability … clueless and frankly dangerous … sanity is off the menu … Brexit has poisoned our whole economic discourse … outbreak of reality seems a long way off … Cabinet should be chosen on merit not loyalty … next few years will be tough … disruptive … symptoms are bloating and egomania … vanity projects … Thick Lizzie represented the culmination of 12 years of Tory policies … income inequality, low productivity and poor public services … freaking social contract …. Sluggish economy … add Brexit to the toxic mix and you have the makings of long term decline…. those attracted to the leadership of such a party are intellectually wanting driven by hunger for personal wealth … Britain’s fiasco … this was, to put it mildly, misleading … nursing shortage of 46,828 … nearly 12% of nursing jobs unfilled … winter of discontent would pose hard questions for both parties … Thick Lizzie’s phone had been hacked … a year’s worth of messages … a similar attack on a government issue phone would have been difficult … Sue Ellen used her personal e-mail to handle classified messages … she is now back in the same job … the outlook for Britain is grim … madness in Westminster …86 profit warnings … more than in any year since 2008 … everything is getting more expensive … 3 way squeeze on households … Consumer confidence has crashed … UK is heading into a grim winter … the economic damage caused by Brexit gets ever clearer … Sue Ellen talks of ‘invasion’ … such talk is inflammatory and immoral … miserable tale of incompetence, cruelty and complacency … Sue Ellen repeatedly pledged stronger borders, lower immigration and more sovereignty … They have achieved the opposite … harebrained … paying Rwanda to take asylum seekers … slapstick version of geo-politics … rather than being a sovereign Britain is a supplicant … incompetence and cruelty of the right … every solution is impractical … the result is paralysis, misery and death … Nobody celebrates Brexit anymore … failure to deliver … we were sold a pup … we were tricked. We were deceived, they conned us, there is no way Brexit benefited us … If Johnson were to walk past I would spit on him … we were all hoodwinked … he did not deliver … shown how incompetent this government is … they should not have promised what they could not deliver … complete and utter lies … acute labour shortage … ideological stuff rushed through without considering the consequences … we have had to accept a lower work ethic … daily reminders of government failure … Chief Twit Elon Musk is determined to make the sewer even more vile … Britain needs strong economic growth … not going to happen … Richy Scumbag confronts a bleak economic landscape … biggest danger of Brexit is not the decline in trade but the hit to financial services … City of London did very well out of being in the EU … a victory that Brexit threw away … Brexit has hurt financial services in many ways …£900B has transferred from the city to the EU … City has lost 7,400 highly paid jobs … playing into your competitor’s hands is always a bad idea … there was a point when Gavin Williamson thought he could be PM … hilarity is not confined to Elon Musk tanking the already tarnished reputation of his $44B purchase … after declaring that Toilet Kwarteng’s budget ‘was the best I heard a Chancellor deliver’ … Telegraph has succumbed to deep depression … Rees Mogg is no mood to apologise for backing a succession of losers … ‘it is the dominant left wing ideology that is to blame for UK going pear shaped … Johnson clearly invoked a faux past … myth that Britain singlehandedly won WW2 … nonsense … Churchill himself advocated what he called a ‘United States of Europe’ … people who should be chastised are seen as heroes of incivility … why is Nigel Garbage not appear on Question Time now that the true reality of his lies are becoming apparent? … Trussonomics, a policy dreamed up by the extreme right of the Tory Party … who is brave enough to tell the truth: stay outside the EU and become increasingly poor or get back in and regain prosperity? …
Pip Pip Don Adamson Medway Delta (Retired) Brexorcist and Saboteur First Class
I decided that this needed to go out before the entire cabinet resigned, so here goes:
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I cannot decide whether Liz Truss conducts her role out of pure incompetence or she is a double agent. Truth be told, I will never know. However, it is fair to say that she is doing a great job of destroying the ERG and the Brexit illusion.
It is time for Keir Starmer, Ed Davey and their parties to acknowledge that Brexit has destroyed Britain’s resilience and offer a grown up analysis of what needs to be done to save the country from itself. David Lammy managed to dodge the bullet this am on the BBC. Brexit Remains the elephant in the room. It’s time to grow up as Jackie Brook points out elegantly.
Regards The Truss, Liz must now listen to moderate Conservatives inside and outside her party. The underlying problem is Brexit, which has destroyed Britain’s ability to absorb shocks. She must make amends to save Britain and her party. It may be too late of course. The appointment of Jeremy Hunt is a nudge strategy in this general direction. Yes, I know that some of you will have another word for Jeremy, but set against the swivel eyed ERG loons, it is an interesting strategy at this time. She faces a radical decision or oblivion and we know that she is (a) a Janusian thinker and (b) willing to be unpopular. Remainers remain (sic) stuck in the hedonic response cycle of only ever seeing one way out of this problem when binary politics delivered Brexit:
You didn't read my full response. I said, get these bastard Tories out first and rejoin the EU. I fail to see why you are attacking me.
— Nick 🏳️🌈 #FBPE #FBPPR #ToriesOut (@batmaker17) October 15, 2022
I am as tough on the thinking of Remainers as I am Brexiteers … 🙂 🙁
A general election is unlikely unless forced in some way. It is yet another Remainer unicorn of low probability. Hope is not a strategy.
Your book looks good! Very pragmatic and constructive. I'm still too stunned by the extent of traitorous xenophobia Brexit exposed to be ready to forget and forgive. Also, IMO, Brexit was a symptom of something bigger that needs addressing or the UK will remain vulnerable.
Don Adamson writes in his inimitable style from Yorkshire.
This week’s quotes: “Thick Lizzie is putting herself in a dangerous position … least experienced cabinet team the UK has had for decades (Comment after 12 years in office) … she will need every bit of Civil Service buy in she can get …Any efforts to introduce yes men will just drain the Civil Service of competent staff … … when Jacob Rees Mogg was supposedly in charge of public sector efficiency … incessantly wailing about civil servants not being at their desks while failing to notice that due to sell off of buildings there were not enough desks for civil servants to be at … Thick Lizzie’s moves are fundamentally unfair … crisis in the National Health Service is well known … calls for an independent enquiry (Comment: in Booming Brexit Britain an ‘independent enquiry is one that obeys Rupert Murdoch’s orders) … services unsafe as doctors struggle with huge workloads … no hope of building the promised 48 new hospitals … new Chancellor has admitted that any gas produced by fracking would not reduce costs for UK consumers … If he does not understand measures in his own price package what hope is there? …24 hours is maximum waiting time to file past body of the Queen … 40 hours waiting time endured by woman needing ambulance and hospital treatment … Thick Lizzie’s rusty Reaganomics … transplanting a 40 year old economic policy from USA to UK will not work … President brushed aside the contradictions … Thick Lizzie’s attempts to emulate the Gipper’s success is doomed … Thick Lizzie’s cheerleaders have read only the first part of the history of Reagonomics … early record was mixed … did not stop a recession … inflation rose … the result will be more conflict between monetary and fiscal policy … risk that inflation becomes entrenched … business leaders are warming to Labour … businesses despair of the Tory Party … after 12 years in office and four radically different PMs the Tories can hardly promise that Johnson’s tenure was especially shambolic … a suspicion that policy is being driven by ideological reflexes … Thick Lizzie’s approach worries firms … as for Jacob Rees-Mogg as business secretary, ‘I could think of a worse choice but you would have to give me an hour … NHS treats its workers so badly they are leaving … struggle to plan holidays … it is bonkers … the whole kit and caboodle of NHS employment is utterly Kafkaesque … working in an organisation that is indifferent to their needs … NHS can be a strikingly uncaring employer … The city is fighting to carve out a post Brexit role … 7,000 jobs, and £1.3Trillion of assets were lost from a sector that employs 1.1m … international firms opening a European hub prefer Amsterdam or Luxembourg … LSE’s importance as an equity hub has dwindled … in 2006 it raised 18% of global capital … in the first half of 2022 less than 1% … A wholesale repeat of the City’s post war reinvention remains out of reach … boosting the economy while ignoring environmental harm would be bonkers … keeping the heat on has replaced flying as an aspiration … Politicians of all stripes console themselves with the thought that Brits voted to leave the EU because they were misled by other, less upstanding politicians. ‘Nobody voted to be poorer’ runs the refrain. A scarier possibility is that people knew perfectly well what they voted for. Brexit will create a smaller economy but voters did not care … Thick Lizzie resembles a neo-liberal Kamikaze pilot, prepared to blow herself up for her cause …. The mad scientists … an experiment to test the riskiest of trickle down fantasies … It seems we have been misled … all we have needed all along was for the government to give vast amounts of money to the rich and wait for it to somehow boost the economy …Established economic theories and fact based research have disappeared a naysayer in a photograph of Stalin … all previous Tory governments have been left wing dupes … how doing nothing is supposed to increase growth is a mystery … this government will just find the money elsewhere … many things about this budget do not make sense … will cost the treasury a fortune … no additional growth, just a lower tax take … Cutting red tape is a right wing panacea, the kind prompted by snake oil sellers … the details are shocking … Justice system, social care, ambulance services and NHS are already on their knees … none of these measures likely to increase growth at all … a right wing wet dream … without even a semblance of an effort to make the numbers add up, no wonder the Office for Budget Responsibilities has been gagged … terrible news for those with mortgages (Comment: Daily Mail readers will love that) … right wing commentators in the press are praising it to the skies, but ignore these and read their financial pages instead … a right wing fantasy, an ideologically driven experiment to stuff the mouths of the rich with gold … it is betting with borrowed money that nobody knows how to repay … schoolboy errors … put the UK economy at risk … Kwarteng has always been a high risk appointment … too casual … too enamoured of his own intellect … a cabinet determined by loyalty to Truss rather than competence … in the space of four days three decades of sound economic management have gone up in smoke … pound suffered a rout … cartoon Thatcherism … Millwall strategy (no one likes us, we don’t care) is hardly a serious approach … Kwarteng, like the Bourbons has learned nothing and forgotten nothing … betrayed weakness not strength …,It is a fantasy to pretend that Britain can ignore the trend … a grab bag of ideas, poorly presented …it makes you wonder if Thick Lizzie is an undercover agent for the Bring Back Boris campaign … smug, cruel, arrogant, know it all ideologies …f*** the lot of you … failings of a wasted decade … sounds like insider trading … if it had happened under a Labour government the papers would have played merry hell … the money markets have made it clear they have no faith in Trussonomics … detestable characters in the Johnson resignation honours list … there are claims that Nadine Dorries knowingly misled Parliament …
Pip Pip Medway Delta (Retired) Saboteur and Brexorcist First Class
Editor’s footnote: since Don wrote this, another Tory MP has been fired …
Don Adamson writes from Yorkshire on the latest mayhem which contributes to our Britastrophe.
This week’s quotes: “Johnson’s ‘levelling up’ agenda is ailing and listless, a casualty of Johnson’s lack of seriousness … Few doubt the new chancellor’s intellect but he swings between genius and idiocy … an attention span of four seconds … The Chancellor rattles the Treasury … the Treasury needs good advice more than ever … may not be enough to avoid a downturn … None of this bodes well for the public finances. Yet the government is expected to announce tax cuts … Having got their woman into Downing St dodgy financiers can look forward to … deregulate their businesses yet further … Kwarteng should be able to get his ideas through with less sense checking from experienced officials…. However resounding the next crash the sound for friends of Kwasi wil be ‘kerching’ … Department of Health and Social Care is proving shy about efforts to claw back billions of pounds from underperforming suppliers … progress on suspect suppliers is close to bugger all …Priti Patel put former Australian Foreign Secretary (who helped create Australia’s harsh anti-refugee system) in charge of ‘independent review’ of her Rwanda scheme … leaked files showed guards hitting children or demanding sex from female inmates in grim camps in Papua New Guinea … If Downer could not detect abuse in Australia’s infamous offshore camps it seems unlikely he will spot it in Rwanda … Chris Philp, new appointment as Chief Secretary to the Treasury … why pay any tax at all when they can simply fold their companies when owing hundreds of thousands of pounds to Revenue and Customs … It was refreshing to hear a Labour Politician unapologetic about opposing Brexit, clear about the palpable damage was doing … Sept ans plus tard qui peut pretendre que le Royaume-Uni a beneficie du Brexit (Translation – after seven years who can pretend that the UK benefits from Brexit) … the answer is next to nobody. The tragedy is that the few who do pretend are sitting round the cabinet table, living in la la land imagining that Brexiters who ‘knew what they were voting for’ knew that it was bankers getting bigger bonuses … many of Thick Lizzie and Kwarteng’s plans are detailed in an economically illiterate pamphlet they published ten years ago … Britannia Unchained … unremarkable, badly researched, cherry picked data using taxi drivers’ anecdotes as ‘evidence.’ … evidence is thin … lifting the ban on bankers’ bonuses … even Johnson retreated on this idea … the authors without a science or maths degree between them or any sense of irony … one of the most illiterate parts of the prospectus is the notion that we will all have to work harder … in fact British workers put in longer hours but productivity remains low … the obvious change is more training, investment and better management … if you don’t believe ‘Britannia Unchanged’ the pamphlet has the evidence to convince you … the opinions of taxi drivers … the authors are terrible at maths, economically illiterate, ignorant of science and engineering and completely unaware of how to research a book or write well … smug, selfish, self satisfied, lacking in empathy, ignorant of facts and believing in their own fantasy economics …unfortunately they are now running the country …
Pip Pip
Don Adamson, Medway Delta (Retired), Saboteur and Brexorcist First Class
I don’t really think that Boris Johnson deserves more than one minute to reflect upon his legacy so I made several videos in less than one minute on this subject. In fact James O’Brien summed up the detail so well that I don’t feel i could better that. In summary we are talking about:
Broken promises on Brexit (It is NOT “DONE”, it will consume a lifetime of wasted time and money to continue the pretence). To read the full history, read Private Eyelines – Have I Got Fake Brexit News for EU and Reboot Britain – Strategies and skills to change minds on Europe and Brexit. Remainers and Rejoiners seriously need to up their skills if we are to win the next battle with the populists. Never forget that we lost two elections and a referendum, however inconvenient that fact is. Yesterday I delivered copies of these books to Sir Alan Sugar, Richard Branson and James O’Brien. I wish to send them to Hugh Grant next if anyone can help with this.
On Brexit, COVID and lies
Outright LIES on COVID (Johnson was late to the party when others were listening to experts. He conducted an experiment with genocide by placing infected NHS patients into care homes, causing 10’s of 1000’s of unnecessary deaths). The list goes on. These were political CHOICES and not inevitable. Johnson has been lying ever since he was born. Why would we expect any different from him?
On COVID, care homes and unnecessary deaths
On Brexit, Kettles and gold wallpaper
Industrial levels of distraction or dead cat politics, the latest one being the “kettle”. Even the kettle story is not correct. If you want your kettle to boil faster, descaling and using the correct amount of water will make bigger impacts on your bill. £20 is of course not even significant when compared with the actual energy price rises, but Johnson assumes that people cannot add up.
I don’t believe the Tories will call an election in order to lose their majority but if they do, we’ll need to do better than sharing memes on fb. The Daily Maul has set another dead cat loose on this subject today. Preparation is better than regret. Learn the skills to persuade people outside your bubble to change their voting behaviour here.
I don't believe the Tories will call an election in order to lose their majority but if they do, we'll need to do better than sharing memes on fb.
Preparation is better than regret.
Learn the skills to persuade people outside your bubble to change their voting behaviour here.
— Reboot Britain – Rage Against The Brexit Machine (@BrexitRage) September 3, 2022
Join us on Monday September 12 at 8 pm on ZOOM to build momentum to remove the Brexit beast from our lives and build a better Britain in a better Europe for a better World.
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