Boris Johnson planning to prorogue parliament [split topic]

[Johnny Yesno]

The insidious ideology pushing us towards a Brexit cliff-edge
George Monbiot

For neoliberal zealots, no deal represents a great opportunity to dramatically reshape Britain

At first sight it's incomprehensible. Why risk everything for a no-deal Brexit? Breaking up their own party, losing their parliamentary majority, dismantling the UK, trashing the economy, triggering shortages of food and medicine: how could any objective, for the Conservative and Unionist party, be worth this? What good does it do them?

Yes, some people will benefit. To judge by recent donations to the Conservative party, some very rich people approve of Boris Johnson's policies. A no-deal Brexit might favour hedge funds that thrive on uncertainty, financiers seeking to short the pound, vulture capitalists hoping to mop up cheap property if markets collapse. But the winners are likely to be greatly outnumbered by the losers, among whom are many powerful commercial interests.

We make a mistake when we assume that money is the main motivation. Our unreformed, corrupt and corrupting political funding system ensures it is an important factor. But what counts above all else is ideology, as ideology successfully pursued is the means to power. You cannot exercise true power over other people unless you can shape the way they think, and shape their behaviour on the basis of that thought. The long-term interests of ideology differ from the short-term interests of politics.

This, I believe, is the key to understanding what is happening today. The Brexit ultras in government are not just Brexit ultras. They are neoliberal ultras, and Brexit is a highly effective means of promoting this failed ideology. It's the ultimate shock doctrine, using a public emergency to justify the imposition of policies that wouldn't be accepted in ordinary times. Whether they really want no deal or not, the threat of it creates the political space in which they can apply their ideas.

Neoliberalism is the ideology developed by people such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. It is not just a set of free-market ideas, but a focused discipline, deliberately applied around the world. It treats competition as humanity's defining characteristic, sees citizens as consumers and "the market" as society's organising principle. The market, it claims, sorts us into a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Any attempt by politics to intervene disrupts the discovery of this natural order.

It was embraced by Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and most subsequent governments. They sought to implement the doctrine by cutting taxes, privatising and outsourcing public services, slashing public protections, crushing trade unions and creating markets where markets did not exist before. The doctrine was imposed by central banks, the IMF, the Maastricht treaty and the World Trade Organization. By shutting down political choice, governments and international bodies created a kind of totalitarian capitalism.

It has failed on its own terms, and in many other ways. Far from creating general prosperity, growth has been slower in the neoliberal era than it was in preceding decades, and most of its fruits have been gathered by the rich. Far from stimulating an enterprise economy, it has created a gilded age for rent-seekers. Far from eliminating bureaucracy, it has created a Kafkaesque system of mad diktats and stifling control. It has fomented ecological, social, political, economic and financial crises, culminating in the 2008 crash. Yet, perhaps because its opponents have not produced a new, compelling story of their own, it still dominates our lives.

Unsurprisingly, people have reacted to the closure of political choice and the multiple disasters it caused. But because neoliberalism, in broad terms, was adopted not only by the right, but also by the Democrats, New Labour and similar parties, there were few places to turn. Many people responded with nationalism and nativism. The new politics that Boris Johnson's government represents incorporates both neoliberalism and the reaction to it. The glitter-eyed essentialists on the frontbenches – such as Dominic Raab, Liz Truss and Sajid Javid – still seek to implement the ideology in its most extreme form. The opportunists, such as Johnson, Michael Gove and Priti Patel, appeal to those who seek scapegoats for the disasters it has created.

Johnson uses neoliberal framing to justify his attacks on public safety. He wants to pull down environmental standards, create free ports in which businesses can avoid tax and regulation, and strike a rapid trade deal with the United States that is likely to rip up animal welfare rules and threaten the survival of the NHS.

He rages against red tape, but the real red tape is created by the international trade treaties he favours, that render democratic change almost impossible, through rules that protect capital against popular challenge, and shift decision-making away from parliaments and into unaccountable offshore courts ("investor-state dispute settlement"). This explains the enthusiasm among some on the left for Brexit: a belief that escaping from the EU means escaping from coercive trade instruments. In reality, it exposes us to something even worse, as the UK enters negotiations with the US, holding a begging bowl.

Now, as the professor of political economy Abby Innes argues, neoliberalism has reached its Brezhnev phase: "ossification, self-dealing, and directionless political churn". Like Leninism, neoliberalism claims to be an infallible science. Its collision with the complexities of the real world has caused political sclerosis of the kind that characterised the decline of Soviet communism. As a result, "the only way to complete this revolution today is under cover of other projects: Brexit is ideal".

The creation of emergency is the inevitable destination of an absolutist, failed system. But emergency also provides the last means by which the failed system can be defended and extended.

• George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/11/brexit-ultras-triumph-neoliberalism

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Good stuff. The aspect about neoliberal politics needing to mutate and adopt (or even manufacture its own) insurgency movements to survive is a topic I've read about even as far back as 2008.

There is no need to make this overly technical though. If you focus on the movement as being what it is - the transfer of assets from many people to few people then the rest is just tactics to achieve that.

This is why many of us could see how horrific Leave would be, because we know and can identify which politicians and public figures favour the transfer of assets from many people to few people.

The Leave campaign correctly assumed that enough people would not recognise those people and would instead aim their fire at the larger, incomprehensible body, the EU, whipped up with enough nationalist rhetoric for the EU to become an adversary.

So while it is perhaps too strong to simply call the ordinary people who voted Leave thick, let alone racist, they were voluntarily ill informed and they were duped. We are living in an apolitical age where swathes of people are so lacking in any concept of politics that they react with incomprehension that two parties with diametrically opposite histories and traditions can't 'get around the table and sort it out and get on with it'. People so apolitical that if you pinned rosettes on a tug of war they would think the objective was for both sides to move the rope in the same direction.

[mothman]

Biggy to magically reappear to insist the EU is the true neoliberal master project in 3, 2, 1...

[BlodwynPig]

Hey, at least Andrew Flintoff is ok after the crash eh, Sun 'readers'?

[Johnny Yesno]

So while it is perhaps too strong to simply call the ordinary people who voted Leave thick, let alone racist, they were voluntarily ill informed and they were duped.

To be fair, many leavers and remainers are struggling with the idea that there's two groups of baddies regarding brexit:

In Britain, as in the US, the business elite has fractured into two groups: one wants to defend the multilateral global order and globalised free trade; another desires to break the system. Here, as with Trump, that group includes the fracking bosses, the tax-dodging private equity bosses and the speculative ends of property and high finance.

I don't know why this is given this kind of thing has been going on forever.

[buttgammon]

I've been reading about the 2008 crash recently and the more I think about it, the more I think this whole nightmare started there. Anything that moved away from neoliberal orthodoxy (quantitative easing, for example) was quickly absorbed into the system and made to work for it. Not only was austerity profoundly unfair but even on an economic level, it was grossly misapplied; in countries like Ireland where the banks had completely overreached themselves, slashing public finances was the equivalent of firefighters going to a house fire, running around the corner and dousing water on a house that isn't on fire at all. In Britain, austerity was justified in economic terms as some sort of preemptive strike against debt but I think most of us on this forum are well aware that it was a malicious ideological attack.

Austerity ravaged solidarity and the structures that facilitated solidarity. It destroyed communities and also the sense of community people had; this made it much easier for people to turn against one another in the 2016 referendum, and it has helped to create the divided society we live in now. In a sense, austerity was another divide and rule trick. Note the distinction often made between the 'working poor' and the unemployed, and the shocking mistreatment of benefits claimants. As Paul Mason suggests in that article on the previous page, we are now in the point where things have got out of control and the neoliberals are divided too. The economic rationale for events has been getting flimsier and flimsier, and we're now at the point where the plans for Britain (if we can even call them plans) will only benefit libertarian disaster capitalists who make money out of misery.

[Johnny Yesno]

I've been reading about the 2008 crash recently and the more I think about it, the more I think this whole nightmare started there.

And this can be traced back to Thatcher.

[BlodwynPig]

And this can be traced back to Thatcher. Churchill. King Henry VIII. Ethelred the Unready.

[Buelligan]

Thanks for the links Johnny, particularly the Paul Mason one, which I have forwarded on to others.  I think we've reached the tipping point, as Mason says, we need to go out into the wider world, reach beyond our normal circles, and peacably, reasonably, unstoppably, talk about this.  Witness our resistance every moment.

[Jumblegraws]

Thanks to Clatty for his comprehensive reply last night.

[Paul Calf]

I've been reading about the 2008 crash recently and the more I think about it, the more I think this whole nightmare started there. Anything that moved away from neoliberal orthodoxy (quantitative easing, for example) was quickly absorbed into the system and made to work for it. Not only was austerity profoundly unfair but even on an economic level, it was grossly misapplied; in countries like Ireland where the banks had completely overreached themselves, slashing public finances was the equivalent of firefighters going to a house fire, running around the corner and dousing water on a house that isn't on fire at all. In Britain, austerity was justified in economic terms as some sort of preemptive strike against debt but I think most of us on this forum are well aware that it was a malicious ideological attack.

Austerity ravaged solidarity and the structures that facilitated solidarity. It destroyed communities and also the sense of community people had; this made it much easier for people to turn against one another in the 2016 referendum, and it has helped to create the divided society we live in now. In a sense, austerity was another divide and rule trick. Note the distinction often made between the 'working poor' and the unemployed, and the shocking mistreatment of benefits claimants. As Paul Mason suggests in that article on the previous page, we are now in the point where things have got out of control and the neoliberals are divided too. The economic rationale for events has been getting flimsier and flimsier, and we're now at the point where the plans for Britain (if we can even call them plans) will only benefit libertarian disaster capitalists who make money out of misery.

In much the same way as post-WWI austerity in Germany as a result of catastrophically punitive reparations to France led to the emergence of populist tyranny? The same way as post-Soviet collapse resulted in the emergence of a Russian dictatorship? It happens every single time. The wealthy will turn to fascism to protect their estates, because fascists promise to keep order and let them keep their money.

Every fucking time.

[Urinal Cake]

Every fucking time.

Because it's easy.

[Ambient Sheep]

BBC News - Johnson denies lying to Queen over Parliament suspension

Well of course he does.  He got Rees-Mogg (along with Baroness Evans and Mark Spencer), who made the trip up to Balmoral, to do it for him.

[olliebean]

Has anyone got a link to anything more about the "briefings to selected journalists that the government might suspend the rule of law by invoking the Emergency Powers Act" that Paul Mason mentioned in that article? I'm wondering if he heard something and got the wrong end of the stick; for one thing the Emergency Powers Act doesn't exist any more - it was replaced by the Civil Contingencies Act - and whilst I found plenty of people going back ages (way before Boris Johnson was PM) speculating that's something the Government might invoke, I couldn't find any suggestion elsewhere that any journalists had actually been briefed to that effect.

[Head Gardener]

no fear here

[Paul Calf]

They could just continue to ignore the law.

[danielreal2k]

Man heckling Boris "taken outside by security" 

[Fambo Number Mive]

Apparently Johnson claimed in Rotherham he never said "spaffed up the wall"

Video of him saying "spaffed up the wall" about spending on investigating historic sexual abuse allegations:
https://twitter.com/Dogtrouser/status/1172495785918947329

The little "whoo" by someone on the video when the bloke is finally removed is revolting.

Here's Johnson confronted in Doncaster: https://twitter.com/Channel4News/status/1172478890817839104

In both cases, Doncaster and Rotherham, the response by Leavers is to claim they are "plants"

[NoSleep]

Well, they only have Question Time audiences to compare them to.

[George Oscar Bluth II]

Has anyone got a link to anything more about the "briefings to selected journalists that the government might suspend the rule of law by invoking the Emergency Powers Act" that Paul Mason mentioned in that article? I'm wondering if he heard something and got the wrong end of the stick; for one thing the Emergency Powers Act doesn't exist any more - it was replaced by the Civil Contingencies Act - and whilst I found plenty of people going back ages (way before Boris Johnson was PM) speculating that's something the Government might invoke, I couldn't find any suggestion elsewhere that any journalists had actually been briefed to that effect.

I dunno but rumours about the Civil Contingencies Act have been circling for a while. And if you look it up it is quite loose in what counts as an "emergency" although tbh the Yellowhammer scenario would almost certainly count.

1Meaning of "emergency"

(1)In this Part "emergency" means—

(a)an event or situation which threatens serious damage to human welfare in a place in the United Kingdom,

(b)an event or situation which threatens serious damage to the environment of a place in the United Kingdom, or

(c)war, or terrorism, which threatens serious damage to the security of the United Kingdom.

And once you've declared an emergency you can then amend any statute for 30 days except for the Human Rights Act and the Civil Contingencies Act, via the royal prerogative. It's really cool legislation.

[olliebean]

Apparently the Black Swan scenario involves rationing of food and energy and the imposition of martial law.

[Cuellar]

Haha brilliant!!

[mothman]

So is there going to be a future iteration of this thread for when it hits 100 pages and gets locked? What with there being a Brexit thread, and a Tory Party thread, and a Corbyn thread..?

[monkfromhavana]

Apparently the Black Swan scenario involves rationing of food and energy and the imposition of martial law.

"You love rationing, don't you? You've been waiting for an opportunity to do rationing on me since the day we met."

[JamesTC]

I dunno but rumours about the Civil Contingencies Act have been circling for a while. And if you look it up it is quite loose in what counts as an "emergency" although tbh the Yellowhammer scenario would almost certainly count.

And once you've declared an emergency you can then amend any statute for 30 days except for the Human Rights Act and the Civil Contingencies Act, via the royal prerogative. It's really cool legislation.

So they will use the threat of no deal to push through no deal?

Fucking hell.

[BlodwynPig]

So is there going to be a future iteration of this thread for when it hits 100 pages and gets locked? What with there being a Brexit thread, and a Tory Party thread, and a Corbyn thread..?

Threads are rationed, mate

[Zetetic]

I didn't mean to cite the use of PFI as evidence of true evil, but just that it's a major difference between Welsh Labour and Plaid and the other administrations, when otherwise Wales and Scotland's structures look pretty similar.

Looks like I was being optimistic about this anyway, with Welsh Labour effectively turning to PFI to finance hospital construction now.

[Alberon]

So is there going to be a future iteration of this thread for when it hits 100 pages and gets locked? What with there being a Brexit thread, and a Tory Party thread, and a Corbyn thread..?

I suppose we could have a new Johnson specific thread considering he's such a calamitous fuckwit. He could be closer to the end of his time as Prime Minister than he is to the start.

Johnson - The Final Days

or we could go straight to

Martial Law Countdown

or just a full on

Clowne Apocalyspe

[jobotic]

The Final Days of May threads went on for a thousand years...

[Alberon]

Yeah, but Johnson doesn't have a fraction of the unreasoning bloodymindedness of May. He's just had two weeks of Parliament and he looks totally fucked off already.,