Nearly three years after the UK’s EU Referendum of June 2016, it is now clear that brexit, it if happens at all, will totally fail to deliver on the promises made to those who voted to leave the European Union. This failure is, of course, partly due to the internal contradications of brexit, but it is also due to the intransigence of the Prime Minister. It was she who drew red lines and embarked upon a vision of brexit totally of her own making. The close 52/48 result of the EU Referendum should have been a signal to pursue a…
Recently my young nephew was walking around the house wincing and yelping with every step. “What’s the matter?” asked his mother.
“Lego”
“Lego?”
“Sock”
She looked at his feet.
“You’ve put Lego in your socks?”
The little boy nodded.
“Why?”
He shrugged
“I’ll take it out” she suggested
“No, no, no!” he screamed and struggled against attempts to extricate him from his Scandinavian toy brick footwear.
“Lego. Sock.”
Off he toddled, crying in pain with each footstep.
In her Easter message Theresa May talked about Brexit and claimed ‘there is a sense that people are coming together and uniting behind the opportunities that lie ahead’. She is wrong. There is no such sense. The UK isn’t coming together. The leave and remain camps are as entrenched as ever. People are still taking to the streets and protesting against Brexit.
In fact, she is not simply wrong, the ‘sense’ is a fabrication, the Easter message was fake news. She was deliberately setting the scene for her next move.
Two days later, she announces a surprise snap election, saying…
The self-delusion, fantasies and out and out lies of brexiteerism are about to be cast into unforgiving daylight by the triggering of Article 50. Undoubtedly, their ideology will soon shrivel up and die as it meets the harsh reality of the real world. The question is, who will they deflect the blame onto and will the public fall for it?
The targets are clear, the weapons are drawn and the ground has been prepared by the right wing press during the phony war since the EU referendum. However, the attacker’s best weapon, the element of surprise, has been lost. The…
The result of the UK’s referendum on membership of the European Union has lifted the veil of complacency and brought the country’s divisions and problems into focus. These issues can now be addressed. Pre-referendum Britain has gone, and that’s a good thing. As Joni Mitchell once sang: “Don’t it always seem to go. That you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.”
A narrow win for Remain would have been a boring rubber-stamping of the status quo and would have left festering unfinished business. A Leave victory brings issues into the open and sparks a new debate. …
We walk around with devices that are super-connected to the world in a way that was unthinkable even a few years ago. We have the potential to live in a global village, with the fabric of our society written digitally across the planet.
However, far from expanding our horizons, the Internet has enabled us to seek out others who are just like us and things that people like us enjoy. We gather around nodes of information that we agree with and live in our own self-curated online bubbles.
We have failed the Internet.
It is not undemocratic, ignoring the voice of the people or remainer whining to call for a second EU referendum. In fact, not having a second referendum is deeply unfair to both Leave and Remain voters. Without it we will not have a voice in the creation of our new relationship with the EU and will be stuck with whatever deal the UK government eventually strikes. How undemocratic is that?
On 23rd June 2016 the UK narrowly voted to leave the EU, but it soon became apparent that there was no plan for what leaving actually means. …
On June 23 2016 the UK voted to leave the European Union. It is now five weeks on and we are still in a state of confusion. Here are the reasons why it keeps me up at night:
A question that should not have been asked
David Cameron wanted to settle the EU issue once and for all and made the disastrous decision of calling the referendum. It didn’t have to happen.
Leave. It’s a common, active verb. You leave the house to go out and have fun. You leave it all behind and go on holiday. You leave a boring party. Maybe that’s why people post ‘Leave’ posters in their window; it sounds snappy, proactive and strong. The collective noun ‘Leavers’ evokes images of school leavers joyously throwing their caps in the air and skipping towards a bright future.
So, what about ‘stay’, or simply ‘in’? You stay in if you’re too boring to leave the house and go out and have fun. You stay at a dull party, even when…
Today, you only realise that you have crossed over from Northern Ireland into the Republic of Ireland when you start noticing road signs in Irish and kilometres. The border is a solid line on a map, but in everyday reality it is an invisible threshold. People cross it daily to go to work, to shop, to visit friends, barely noticing its presence.
However, if the UK votes to leave the EU in the upcoming referendum then that currently fuzzy line would become the hard frontier between an EU and a non-EU country. It is historically a notoriously porous rural border…
Jack Stow
Piano playing, singer-songwritering, Hammond bothering, blog posting, web designing, photo taking twitaholic.
