The fury of the scorned

Remainer fury yesterday was fierce, on the release by the Intelligence and Security Commission of the long-awaited Russia report. The fury on show extended to members of the committee itself. It was not, however, directed at the Russians, for having attempted to interfere in the 2014 Scots referendum, but at the entire Leave side, for the result of the 2016 referendum not having been subject to Russian interference.

They excoriated the security services for not finding something that wasn't there. They wanted, I bet, to excoriate the Russians for not having interfered. But most of all they were furious that the 52% won the referendum fair and square, when for four years FBPE stars  have tacitly supported suggestions that the Russians crooked the result. They failed even to find anything on Arron Banks, long the target of Russian smears. Brendan O'Neill has a piece in the Speccie hoping, I think naively, that this report will now end Russsian conspiracy whispers in relation to the referendum. I doubt it.

The report did however include one paragraph of note - but we have to read through the redactions -

One of the fundamental pillars of a free democracy, the integrity of the secret ballot, is largely safe - or it was when the committee took its evidence, and before the 2019 election.

What is safe is the process that involves stubby pencils on bits of string and collapsible hardboard voting booths, locked boxes being opened and votes counted in local town halls and sports centres. This, at least, Blair could not foul with his 'reforms'. However, I'll bet a pound to a pea that the redactions include reservations about the integrity of the postal voting system. It is this, rather than fantasies about the integrity of the 2016 referendum, that should now dominate the committee's concerns.

The 2019 general election saw the proportion of postal votes rise to 37%. At the same time, public confidence in the integrity of the postal vote process has fallen. Voters know what's going on, even if the Electoral Commission doesn't. What's extraordinary about the postal vote level in the 2019 election is that a 120-page report on the election by the Commons Research dept, a report that includes an analysis of everything from the weather on polling day to the numbers of spoiled ballots, makes not one mention of this extraordinary increase in postal votes.

Covid may mean great pressure to move to wholly postal voting, absent a vaccine. Before we acquiesce, we must be sure that the process is secure. Here is where members should turn their attention, not chasing remainer fantasies around the integrity of the 2016 referendum. 

Update
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The report is also critical of the extent of Lords' interests in Russian money, and the Mail points out Peter Mandelson's shareholdings in Russian defence firm Sistema, and that he previously sat on the company's board. Peter's interests aren't just Russian, though - he's also President of both the Great Britain China Centre and the German British Forum.

Is Theresa May facing deselection?

Tomorrow will be  a crunch day for Theresa May, as for a score of other Remainer Tory MPs.

It is expected that Conservative MPs will be subject to a three line whip to defend the government against Remainer attempts to sabotage Brexit. Mrs May has chosen to remain on the back benches in the Commons - and is now no different from any other Tory MP in having to comply with the whip. Boris has made it clear that voting against the government, or abstaining, means automatic deselection. Only death or serious injury is an excuse.

So it seems Mrs May has three choices tomorrow; obey the whip, literally throw herself in front of a (slow moving) bus or defy the whip and be turfed out of her Maidenhead seat in advance of the inevitable general election in a few weeks.

My bet is that she will vote for the government, that Rory Stewart won't, and will be booted out of Penrith, and of the others, some will and some won't. And I don't think there's a newspaper or columnist in the country who can call it better than that. 

Who will be the Petain of their Government of National Surrender?

Remainiacs were scrambling over the weekend to place themselves as candidates to head a new Government of National Surrender to follow the imagined defeat of our government in September. Caroline Lucas was first out of the traps, volunteering to head an all-female LBGTQB (including trans) government of yellow-greens with a bit of pink. Chukka Ummummumma was not far behind, and Dominic Grieve has been hanging around outside the studios to lig more air time. @RoryWanksOn has turned around and is heading back to Westminster and even Anna Soubry is considering which outfits would do best against the background of a big glossy black door.

They are all, of course, living in a fantasy world, away in a bunker. Any such moves would see them slaughtered in an election pitched as 'people vs. parliament' - I can tell you the result now. People will win big. I can only imagine the heat had addled their brains; one doesn't have to dig far to discover the deep contempt in which Petain, Laval and Darlan are still held in France.

Saturday's Opinium poll may also just start to sink in -

Opinium - Fieldwork 8th/9th August

Opinion is shifting week by week behind a clean Brexit. The big issue that remains unresolved for the Autumn election is any pact between my party and The Brexit Party; don't believe the early denials. If that's what it takes to secure a thumping Leave majority in the House, it will happen.

Politics is cruel. Several papers print the eyespymp snap of Philip Hammond sans armoured jag and armed bodyguards with his bags on a tube at Piccadilly station. He's just a backbench MP now, and may not even be that by Christmas.

Did they have to show him how to use an Oyster card?

Lawfare - The tide turns

This year's Reith Lectures by Lord Sumption really were extraordinarily prescient. Go on, listen to them if you haven't already - after all, you paid for them. Just like you've paid already for all the classic TV that the BBC will now charge you £70 a year to watch. Back to Sumption. He decried the intrusion of legal processes into matters that ought to be democratically decided - into political matters. Increasingly, those unhappy with the decision by the British electorate to Leave the EU have used the courts and legal processes to seek to frustrate or sabotage our exit. From Gina Miller to the biased Common Purpose shills at the Electoral Commission who have misconducted themselves in the exercise of their authority, Remain has taken up Lawfare in preference to democracy.

But now it seems the tide is turning. The biased and crooked Electoral Commission have now been slapped down three times by the courts - surely enough to provoke the mass cull of both Commissioners and the top two tiers of management - the latest over their unlawful persecution of young Darren Grimes. Arron Banks, fed up with the lies, barbs and insults of Remain campaigners posing as journalists, is taking Carole Cadwalladr to court to make an example of her.

Boris is also expected to push a robust and committed Attorney General into vigorous legal opposition to attempts to challenge the government in the courts - to maintain, as Lord Sumption has cogently explained, the proper separation of legal from political matters.

In the words of Corporal Jones, they don't like it up 'em.

Now that Leave have started playing the Lawfare game, and winning, the Remain side want to pull stumps -

... press freedom campaigners and charity groups warn the government in an open letter that UK courts are being used to “intimidate and silence” journalists working in the public interest. In a joint letter to key cabinet members, they call for new legislation to stop “vexatious lawsuits”, highlighting one filed last week by Banks against campaigning journalist Carole Cadwalladr.

reports the Guardian.

You couldn't make it up.

Ignore the roar of the public at your risk

The narcissistic Remoaners in Parliament who are deluded enough to believe that their own selfish views, their personal inflated opinions, trump the bellow of the people of Britain, 17.4 million voices crying LEAVE, are sowing the seeds of their own downfall. 

Yvette Cooper, who with her husband Ed Balls 'flipped' main residence three times solely out of greed, to maximise the expenses they troughed from our taxes, now wants to augment her Parliamentary stipend with a Leader's wedge. Her vacuous pledge to house a migrant in one of her several homes has come to naught; instead she is flipping the bird to the people of Britain with petty Parliamentary jiggery. Likewise Dominic Grieve, a man who loves himself so greatly that he cannot conceive that his opinion, contrary to that of 17.4m voters, should not prevail. So like some plague rat he labours in the dark to concoct Parliamentary shenanigans that will frustrate our leaving the EU.

They must be unaware that the public view is shifting. Leavers and Remainers. And that instead of appearing as Robin Hoods to the electorate, they are looking like Orcs. Everywhere it is becoming apparent that the people of Britain are becoming sick of the saboteurs, frustrated with the delay and uncertainty. All Grieve and Soubry and Cooper and their ilk are achieving is to strengthen public support for Theresa May.

Boris in his Monday telegraph column is firm in his view that "These feeble plots won't stop Brexit". More tellingly he observes

Did you see Question Time on Thursday, and hear the roar of audience approval for the suggestion that no deal might now be the best option? There is a sense in which the public are braver – and wiser – than their MPs.

Update
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As Guido spotted, The Grauniad has hidden a bang-up-to-date ICM poll that makes 'No Deal' the most popular option with the public - supported by 28% of voters, against 24% who want a second referendum.

Of course remoaners will doubtless claim that as the polling was done last week, many of those polled will have died or changed their minds since, and that the pollsters only actually polled a couple of thousand random but representative Brits. Polls should ask every person in the UK their opinion, they will say, including babies and infants - with glugs, gurgles and random noise to be counted as support for a second referendum.

PTSD Adonis and 'Howler' Grayling - your pain is real

You know I really wasn't jesting when I dubbed Adonis and Grayling with their blog monikers. I have the evidence of semi-hysterical radio and TV interviews with pitched, stressed quavery voices, staccato delivery, mental confusion and so on. Plus an assortment of tweets so ill-advised, jejune and illiberal that only some dreadful cerebral confusion could have caused them. And Since neither of these fine gentlemen could have been at the pharmaceuticals, I reasoned, they must have been overwhelmed at the Brexit vote collapsing their secure little universe.

Now it seems I am academically vindicated - Poltico EU claims

For Britain’s pro-European middle classes, Brexit is akin to a psychological trauma which has left many unable to behave rationally, according to two leading experts. Far from being hyper-rational observers concerned only with what is economically sensible, many have morphed into the “Remainiacs” of Brexiteer disdain.

They are acting no differently to what psychologists would expect from those suffering from chronic anxiety caused by loss of control and insecurity, Dr. Philip Corr, professor of psychology and behavioural economics at the University of London, and Dr. Simon Stuart, a clinical psychologist, told POLITICO.

The shrinks have even coined a clinical term for the condition - Brexit Anxiety Disorder, or BAD. But is it curable, or will 'PTSD' and 'Howler' stay that way for life?

Those suffering anxiety might return to more ‘normal,’ ‘rational’ behaviour if the context around them changes,” he said. Clinically, however, this is often a forlorn hope, because contexts don’t usually tend to change enough.

“In that case, what I’d try to do is help the person become more flexible — in short, to learn how to live with the anxiety, tolerate the uncertainty, and work out how they can continue to engage with what truly matters to them in life, rather than getting caught up trying to change things they can’t change.”

In other words, Remainers may just need to relax and get over it.

Brexit battle lines drawn

In what can only be a co-ordinated campaign by Ultra Remainers, their forces are all on the same battlefield at the same time. Ultra Remainer serving and ex-civil servants, two ex prime ministers, both delusional (one who imagines the ERM and one who imagines the Iraq War were good things), Corbyn's public conversion to a Customs Union, the launch of the EU draft agreement, Barnier, and rude mechanicals and noises off as Andrew Adonis, AC Grayling and the other establishment PTSD casualties set up a louder than usual whine. Blair of course will be spreading his poison from Brussels today - so loathed is he by all sections of the British public there can be few platforms for him here. 

It's instructive that the Telegraph has now adopted the 'Ultra Remainers' term to describe all those establishment figures who have staked their wealth and careers on the EU bandwagon to the extent that they can't let go. With just over a year to Freedom Day, and backed by Soros billions, they will throw everything into the battle. 

Of course I don't mean anything as vulgar as Brexiteers and Ultra Remainers battling on the street. Ultra Remainers don't really do streets and no ordinary Remainer I know could be arsed actually to fight for it, unlike a good proportion of Brexiteers who are rearing to go. No, Ultra Remainers slink along the corridors of power, loiter in mahogany clubs, whisper at black tie events, rat-gnaw at Euro chicken at glittering tables. They thought they governed Britain and are still smarting from the slap they got on 23rd June 2016. They are not prepared to give up power so easily. 

That they are now prepared to so nakedly reveal themselves, from civil servants to their EU handlers, means either desperation or a confidence that they will not be exposed as having conspired against an elected government, will never face sanctions for their actions, will never face a stripping of their honours or a degradation of their estate. If we win this battle, I pray we prove their confidence misplaced. If we lose, I seriously fear the extent of civil disorder that will result. 

  

Brexit - the fork in the road

The fork in the road ahead is within sight. And now is when the Brexit saboteurs go into overdrive, and we get distractions such as that 'leaked' Treasury report. It appears that Treasury civil servants, without ministerial approval, authored an economic forecast document of unremitting gloom which was then somehow leaked. There is speculation in the press that a fifth column of Brexit saboteurs deep within government is throwing everything into the battle to secure membership of the Customs Union and possibly Single Market. Only this is simply not possible without abandoning Brexit. 

So, adopting the responsible position of government, we deny absolutely any wrong doing on the part of the civil service, which maintains a strict political impartiality that had earned it the finest reputation in the world. Then we'll find the bastards in the Treasury responsible and post them to our mission in Chechnia.  

This is just a distraction from the decision that the cabinet - including Hammond - must now agree. Which fork to take. AEP in the Telegraph is clear. Germany is refusing the UK even the pretence of a reasonable deal; they're taking the piss. The long term interests of the UK will not be served by accepting a humiliating deal that destroys our remaining economic advantages. We need to take the path of a clean Brexit, and WTO rules.

Sure, it will cause pain, confusion and chaos in the short term, but we will emerge strong and the EU will lose. And if Mrs May is not woman enough to take the plunge, then the parliamentary party will defenestrate both her and Hammond within a few weeks.

Now it's getting interesting.

Lamont: Blair's argument "completely fraudulent"

Pilots will correct me, but I think the speed / runway distance during an aircraft's take off at which it is no longer possible to abort is termed 'V1' - once reached, the only possible course of action is to continue the ascent, even if an emergency landing is made immediately afterwards. The question facing us all is whether Brexit has reached 'V1'.  

There is a concerted remainer media offensive this week; AC Grayling continues his painful public meltdown and so is deemed unfit to face the camera or microphones, but Andrew Adonis has already delivered a rather hysterical and disconnected plea on the 'Today' programme to abandon Article 50, and today on R4 the Great Dissembler, Blair himself, did his utmost to advance the several specious arguments that remainers use to justify reversing the referendum result. Not only did Humphrys do a reasonable job of taking these apart, but Norman Lamont, the poor badger in the Treasury when Soros mounted his financial assault on Sterling, demolished as fatuous and risible Blair's arguments, concluding that his reasoning was 'completely fraudulent'. 

When I read what remainers want to reverse and return to it is the EU as it was before 23rd June 2016. This was eighteen months ago; if a week is a long time in politics, a year is an eternity. The past is a different country. Even if Article 50 were reversed, it is simply not possible to go back to 2016. The EU has already moved ahead; the EU army that remainers poopooed is in formation via PESCO, sweeping presidential powers are in preparation, an integrated Finance Ministry is gradually winning German acceptance, Macron of France and Schulz, likely soon to be in coalition government in Germany, agree that a United States of Europe should be the goal within eight years. If we seek to return now, not only will we lose the budget rebate but Brussels will demand that we adopt the Euro. It is simply not possible to go back to the way things were in 2016. 

All of which suggest to me that we have already reached V1. There is no longer a 'remain' option - only an option to join anew a completely different EU.

  

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.