Remoanian pissy whine extends across London

Before Lebedev's ownership, and when it used to cost 20p, London's Standard was popularly known as the Evening Mail, accurately reflecting its City-biased editorial stance. There would be up to four editions distributed between 1pm and 5pm, with insiders familiar with the arcane star markings and content of the post-printed racing results / late news strip on the back page who always ensured that they bought the latest edition. Before the internet, people would use it to find flats - homehunters would swoop on the orange and white chevron vans as they tossed out the first bundles of the first editions. That was back in the era of Headbags, when the echoes of Big Bang still reverberated. 

Now the Evening Standard has become quite the metropolitan socially liberal thing, a paper that beardy hipsters are not embarrassed to show in their Quinoa bars or ethical coffee salons. It reflects a new London readership of 800,000 daily copies, and is politically quite wet. No surprise then that Lebedev has picked an arch Remainian for the UK's most Remainian city, in new editor George Osborne. With only one edition, and edited now by subs who often offer bare evidence of literacy, it is today a lifestyle and opinion platform for advertising rather than a serious paper.  

No doubt the Standard under Osborne will join the Guardian in emitting a long pissy whine from all those that just can't get over Brexit. The fools are already blaming Brexit for the break up of the union, failing to realise that it has no more happened yet than the dire economic slump and financial tsunami that the Standard's new editor predicted. With Osborne's piss-poor judgement he will now proceed to give a platform to every Remoaner loon, fruitcake and bug-eyed zealot. Not only do they infest twitter and the Guardian's damp pages, but we'll have now have to snort at their lunacy whilst jammed in the doorspace of a stalled commuter cattle car. 

Tim Stanley in this morning's Telegraph catalogues yet more persistent Remoaners who just won't flush (to steal a phrase from a witty commenter) but Brendan O'Neill writing for Medium does the job perfectly; 

And, of course, all tantrums involve lashing out, as this one does. The levels of antipathy aimed at voters, and at democracy itself, has been extraordinary. We have failed to “keep the mob from the gates”, says Brexit-fearing columnist Matthew Parris. American writer Jason Brennan has become a favourite of liberal publications in the tantrum era because he wrote a book called Against Democracy and says “low-information white people” should not be trusted to make big political decisions.

American-British conservative Andrew Sullivan frets that the “passions of the mob” have been unleashed. A writer for The Observer says it’s time to smash the “taboo” against saying that ordinary people are often very stupid, and “there are times when their stupidity combines to produce gross, self-harming acts of national stupidity”. Don’t worry, mate: that taboo has been well and truly demolished, if it ever existed. Post-Brexit and post-Trump, the chattering classes have not been shy in wondering if the masses are too daft for politics.

But the biggest long pissy whine of all still comes from the Guardian's grievously butthurt scribblers - who are moving to a nihilistic, nationally self-destructive form of sutee to share their pain whilst seeking to destroy the nation's good. Screw 'em. 

Geert Wilders is a prybar, not a national leader

Geert Wilders scored his greatest success back in January, when the electoral threat of the PVV forced incumbent PM Mark Rutte sharply to the right. With full-page adverts on 23rd January in all the national papers and an interview for tabloid Algemeen Dagblad, Mr Rutte had a blunt message for the Netherlands migrants and Moslems - Get Out if you don't like it. Rutte wrote "We feel a growing unease when people misuse our freedoms to spoil everything, when they have come to our country for freedom. People who don’t want to adapt, who attack gay people, who shout at women in short skirts or call ordinary Dutch people racist." Those who wouldn't adapt to Dutch social liberalism should leave. "Be normal, or Begone".

Rutte declared back then that yesterdays election was not about the EU, tax, economics or public services but national identity. "There is one question to be answered. What sort of country do we want?". Last night he had his answer. And I think that we should welcome the result, which I interpret as strong support for a Dutch identity that means freedom, liberalism, tolerance and above all, social congruence. 

Rutte's view that the Dutch have rejected the 'wrong sort' of populism is, I think, correct. His own declarations from January were the 'right' kind of populism. Voters like his strong message, but also trust him to be fair. And Wilders was given just enough encouragement to ensure he continues to act as an effective prybar, keeping the new centreground levered to the right, and most importantly keeping the question of Dutch national identity to the fore. 

The Netherlands is a smart little country. 

Brexit: The Sekt is on ice .......

With our Article 50 notification now just a hair's breadth away, we can expect today some spectacular last-minute disruptions. Satan's little sex-toy to the North will probably announce a new independence referendum, just as US fracking is making third-stage extraction from the North Sea increasingly uneconomic. Soros and his little helpers will throw money at QCs in an effort to use the law to scupper Parliament. The BBC will no doubt find reasons to announce today some dire economic forecasts amid tones of general gloom. Little Owen Jones may offer free blowies to Brexiteers who recant, Lily Allen will give away copies of her dire new album, currently bombing, and even Lord Geldof may emerge to sneer at, shower with spittle and swear at the common folk before his carers get him back into his bath chair. 

None of which should make the slightest difference to the Brexit Bill. If it clears its stages today unamended, I can think of no greater gift to our Sovereign Lady than to submit the Bill for Royal Assent allowing the Prime Minister to give Brussels our formal notice tomorrow. 

There will be a general screeching from Farringdon as a distraught Polly Toynbee dribbles salty snot over a wailing Suzanne Moore's velvet kitten heels. Some hopeless little bloke called Farron will call all the TV stations ( "there's some bloke called Dim Pharom on the line ... yeah, third time he's called ... OK, we'll bar the number" ) Gina Miller will vow revenge on the British people and devote her remaining fortune to keeping members of the bar in Claret, and in Brussels the pressed duck (four fat Flemish ducks for each Commissioner, reduced to a cube the size of a fag packet by a powerful hydraulic press,  a favourite dish served by Herr Juncker) will regorge and repeat acidly into the night. 

Here, I'll pop the caps on a brace of Sekt bottles cooling in the fridge. If it happens.

Erdogan's hired street thugs intimidate Europe

I posted recently on Austria and Germany's refusals to allow the nascent fascist dictator Erdogan to campaign in their countries for support for the April referendum for his Turkish equivalent to the Nazi Enabling Law. Voters in Turkey are divided, and the Turkish Diaspora living elsewhere in Europe who can still vote may swing it. Of 4m Turkish-origin residents in Germany, some 1.6m can vote on this issue.

The latest to feel the rent-a-mob fury of the psychopathic Erdogan are the Dutch; they refused to allow Erdogan's foreign minister to land in Rotterdam, to headline a street rally in support of the Enabling Law. In retaliation, Erdogan's thugs are besieging the Netherlands Embassy in Ankara.     

Austria banned a further Turkish senior official from a proposed rally in Hörbranz on Friday on the grounds of risk to public order. 

Europe gives refuge to many tens of thousands of opponents of Erdogan's regime, not terrorists but professionals, intellectuals and former public officials, who otherwise face detention and torture in squalid Turkish jails at the hands of the Erdogan regime. To allow the very thugs who command the waterboarding to campaign openly in the countries of refuge of their victims for even greater totalitarian power is utterly unacceptable and European governments are doing exactly the right thing in repudiating these second-tier thugs.  

I expect Erdogan to throw half a million migrants into Greece in a tantrum of furious petulance. Let's hope Hungary's, Austria's and Slovenia's fences hold.