Let the people take back control of our impoverished, confused country while a self-serving Government procrastinates to avoid democratic defeat.
“If the Prime Minister can change her mind, from day to day, why can’t the people be allowed to change theirs, 30 months after the referendum #peoplesvote”
Peter Ricketts Peter Ricketts @LordRickettsP
Pietro Liberi Time Being Overcome by Truth c. 1665 Image: WGA
Ghirlandaio Sibyl (Agrippina) 1483-85 Fresco. Santa Trinita. Image: WGA
“The vote for Brexit shone a light on problems that successive Governments have consistently failed to address – communities left behind, inequality, the immigration system, economic stagnation, stretched public services, crisis in housing and social care.
“Britain is one of the most unequal societies in Europe, where success increasingly depends on where you live, which school or university you went to, who your parents are, and who they know.
“With 42% of UK wealth owned by 10% of households, it is no wonder there is a breakdown of trust in our institutions and politicians.
“But is Brexit the solution?” Gina Miller, Remain Plus for a Brighter Future
“What we have ended up with is division, anxiety and unhappiness. The options facing
us are so poorly defined that clarity is desperately and urgently needed. There must be a better way.
“Time is running out, but it is not too late. It is only right, morally and democratically, that the people of the UK are given a vote on a future we will have to face together.
“We believe this is the only way to clear away the confusion, draw a line under Brexit and get back to dealing with the issues facing our country. The only way to end the chaos.”
Extract from Gina Miller’s mission statement on the new website End the Chaos
The full text of Gina Miller’s clear and constructive programme for reform, following A People’s Vote on Brexit, is available to read here: Remain Plus for a Brighter Future
Madness in Washington, madness in Westminster, are manifestations of the same “damaged and defective” world disorder. In America and Britain, a moral paralysis is afflicting people with the power to effect a cure.
Trump is a deadly distraction for the British, who loudly denounce him while being blind to their own Brexit faults. They don’t want their country to decline from global power to Trump’s patsy, and ultimately Putin’s, but they are not doing anything to stop it.
Republicans should “defend their country rather than the damaged and defective man who is now its president” James Fallows, The Atlantic
Tory Brexiteers are saying,
“The loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs will be worth it to regain our country’s sovereignty”
Anna Soubry, reporting extremists’ conversations in the House of Commons, 16 July, 2018.
A TRUMP CARD(IGAN)
Punch cartoon depicting Lord Cardigan leading the Charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava, 1854.
Yet another over-privileged nut-case with inherited wealth and delusions of sovereignty leads everyone else into disaster.
Brexit is as damaged and defective as Trump. The links between Trump and British right-wing Brexiteers are now in the public domain, yet still the powerful drug Denial sedates the electorate, duped by a coup d’etat into believing that unnecessary self-harm is a democratic imperative.
The extreme right wing of both countries very skillfully manipulated voters into turning the tool of democracy against themselves by deploying “opaque” and “insidious” advertizing techniques. (George Monbiot, The Guardian)
Now the British are spooked by a second Referendum, which would actually be the third, on EU membership.
You hear people say, “You can’t just keep on having votes until you get the result you want. It’s not democratic”.
That’s the very definition of democracy: you carry on voting in peaceful election after election throughout your life in the hope you’ll get the result you want before you die. It keeps us quiet. Our expectation of another chance to vote prevents civil war. Democracy, like State Religion, was adopted because it was convenient, not because it was natural or immutable.
If something is not working, if you see the State is sick, you call for a vote to change it. The British are notoriously bad at complaining. They get bad service and bad government as a result. The Poll Tax that sparked a people’s revolt was only one of the abominations against equality and liberty during the Tories’ eighteen-year reign at the end of the 20th century.
THE TRIUMPH OF POVERTY by Lucas Vorsterman. British Museum. Image: WGA
We’re already in the middle of a bloodless civil war, one with no end in sight, not now the over-privileged, rich, right-wing idealogues dreaming of tax havens and workers without rights have got their populist alliance.
Are you really content to just sit and watch while the world burns?
Sofa by Ekhi-Guinea
Or, like the majority of MPs, do you put your caste before your country, ideology before humanity, self-interest before national interest?
Or do you want to take action against what you know in your heart is wrong?
Excerpts from Anna Soubry’s speech in the House of Commons, advocating the benefits of frictionless trade and deploring the Prime Minister’s decision to accept the extreme right-wing Tory amendments to the customs bill:
“[Parliamentary Tory Brexiteers have said in private conversations] that the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs will be worth it to regain our country’s sovereignty…
Nobody voted to be poorer.
Members on the frontbench and across this place should be shaking their heads with shame – this is the stuff of complete madness…
And the only reason that the government has accepted these amendments is because it is frightened of somewhere in the region of 40 members of parliament – the hard, no deal Brexiteers, who should have been seen off a long time ago and should be seen off.
These are people who do not want a responsible Brexit, they want their version of Brexit – they don’t even represent the people who actually voted Leave. The consequences of this are grave…..”
She’s Conservative, blonde and was born in Lincolnshire. Listen to her low-pitched, emphatic voice, see the wagging finger of reproof, and you might think that She, not the legendary Ayesha of Rider Haggard’s late Victorian tales of misogynist imperialist adventure, but the Tories’ own sacred cow, the first great British champion of the European “single market without barriers – visible or invisible”* had been reborn:
The world has turned upside down so many times, none of us know our arses from our elbows. Right-wing Brexiteer Edward Leigh MP, interrupting Anna Soubry’s speech to insult her, as is the arcane custom of our parliamentary representatives, unintentionally paid her the highest compliment:
*Margaret Thatcher, speaking at Lancaster House in 1988.
‘All in the golden afternoon
….
In such an hour,
Beneath such dreamy weather,
To beg a tale…
“There will be nonsense in it!”‘
Lewis Carroll, preface to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865
Thomas Gainsborough Landscape with a Woodcutter and Milkmaid 1755
Oil on canvas
“Nostalgia is denial. Denial of the painful present.
The name for this denial is Golden Age thinking – the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one one’s living in – it’s a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.”
Midnight in Paris, 2011, film written and directed by Woody Allen
“Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not enquire wisely concerning this.”
Ecclesiastes, Chapter 7, Verse 10, King James Bible, 1611
John Constable (1776-1837) Coast Scene at Brighton: Evening, oil painting, ca. 1828
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
“….colours from the sunset take:
From something of material sublime
Rather than shadow our own soul’s day-time
In the dark void of night.”
(Keats, Epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds)
“Set yourself on fire with passion and people will come for miles to watch you burn”
attributed to John Wesley (1703-1791)
Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) Wooded Landscape with Herdsman and Cattle‘And now the tale is done,
And home we steer, a merry crew,
Beneath the setting sun.’
Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), preface to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865
These are the warnings shared by ten professional health organisations with all Members of Parliament about the impact of Brexit on the most unifying of our nation’s modern institutions, the one that heals more divides than football coming home, more than the monarchy, more than the Lottery, TV soap operas or Dad’s Army, the only one attending most of us from birth to death, the one that gives health to national identity:
Nine MPs from six parties, including two GPs, a surgeon and two former Health Ministers, have united to ask the Prime Minister asking for urgent action to protect the NHS from Brexit:
I’m an NHS doctor who works in the A&E department. I voted Leave in the EU referendum, but now I’ve joined the campaign for a people’s vote on the final terms of the Brexit deal.
Source: Charles Gallaher The Independent
REMAINER OR LEAVER, YOUR NATION’S HEALTH NEEDS YOU TO DEMAND A PEOPLE’S VOTE ON THE FINAL BREXIT DEAL
Fortitude Sculpture by Serpotta in white stucco and gilding, height 200 cm, 1710-17.
Oratorio del Rosario di San Domenico, Palermo. Image: WGA
Fortitude is one of the four Cardinal Virtues of Christianity, recommended in a life skills course dating back to the 4th century, based on Aristotelian and Platonic ethics.
Aristotle defined fortitude as courage governed by reason (or temperance) in circumstances of fear or over-confidence: “Courage….chooses its course and sticks to its post because it is noble to do so, or because it is disgraceful not to do so.”
St Augustine of Hippo defined fortitude as “love readily bearing all things for the sake of the loved object”.
Kant: “Virtue is the moral strength of the will in obeying the dictates of duty, never developing into a custom but always springing freshly and directly from the mind.”
Fortitude has become rarer in the modern world where license has chained us to new tyrannies, and freedom is as elusive as ever.
The advantages of self-control in adverse circumstances have been forgotten in the revolt against the misunderstood stiff upper lip. It’s adorable. The straighter the face, the better the joke.
The primary importance of sincerity in human intercourse – “speak what you feel, not what you ought to say” – has been effaced by knee-jerk opinion polls and social media group anxiety – Like to be Liked, Follow and Ye Will Be Followed – which have compromised Freedom of Speech and promulgated the nonsense that passes for wisdom nowadays.
If you’ve read this far, you deserve a modest disclaimer: yes, I’m as foolish as you.
The most self-expressive of Romantic poets would not have predicted humanity blogging itself to death.
The people who died for Democracy did not expect the Voice of the People would come from Babel.
Fortitude rests on her broken pillar, not on popularity.
Fortitude does not betray her soul, which to her is virtue, which to us is self-identity.
She fights on.
She wears the shoes she wants.
She?
All four of the Cardinal Virtues, Prudence (or Wisdom), Fortitude (or Courage), Temperance (or Self-control) and Justice (or Fairness) were allegorized as female.
Figures of the Four Virtues from Ballet Comique de la Reine, 1582, one of the court entertainments commissioned by Catherine de Medici from which classical ballet, and political satire, developed. Image: Wikipedia
Fortitude lives up to her reputation for cheerfulness in adversity by playing the lute and holding a pillar at the same time.
Poster for Top Hat, 1935
The Government’s own Department for Exiting the EU has concluded that the best option for the United Kingdom’s economy and people’s jobs
is to Remain.
Whether you are a Leaver or a Remainer, if you are resident in Britain, if you are a British National or an EU National, and you love this country, please join the movement to have a say on the final deal that will make or break
all our futures, and the lives of our children.
From Brexit Exposed on Facebook
Brexit Exposed EDITORIAL: “Andrew Adonis’ letter to former minister and leading Brexiteer Iain Duncan Smith who told him to leave the country and ‘find somewhere else to live’ if he disagreed with Brexit.
The implication for the countless millions who don’t share the view of the hardline Brexit zealots is clear.
You don’t deserve British citizenship or the right to reside here.
You don’t have a basic right of free speech either – the same free speech enjoyed by Leave supporters for over four decades whilst in the European Union to question the issue of membership, or not.
This is totalitarianism, pure and simple. It’s the ideology behind the practice to arrest, deport or kill citizens who have a different political view to those in power.
It is the thinking behind authoritarian states throughout history. It is also the ideology behind the right wing cult of Brexit.
The Ian Duncan Smith remark is revealing. We see it in his supporters across social media every day.”
Pieter Boel Large Vanitas Still-Life 1663 Oil on canvas, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille.
Image: Wikipedia
Mark Carney. Governor of the Bank of England, “told MPs yesterday that UK households were £900 per year worse off than they would have been based on forecasts from May 2016 – just before the Brexit vote. As the Bank of England governor put it, “that’s a lot of money”. And that’s before we’ve even left the EU.
The vote to leave the EU has [caused] the value of the pound to tumble and inflation to rise from 0.5% to 2.5%.
But worse economic disruption could be yet to come if May’s hard-Brexit plans wrench us out of the EU’s single market, with which we do half our trade.” Open Britain.
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