CUMBERBATCH & BREXIT MADE SEXY

Review:  'Brexit: The Uncivil War' on C4
by Brian Bamford

Dominic Cummings

ON Monday the 25th, April 2016, Derek Pattison put a post up on the NV Blog entitled 'Vote Leaves' Campaign Director tells select committee: "Accuracy is for snake-oil pussies".'  It accused Dominic Cummings, the newly appointed to run Vote Leave campaigner, of being the 'Vote Leave silly Ass - Dominic Cummings'.  In last night's Channel 4’s drama Brexit: The Uncivil War, Dominic Cummings, as portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch was presented as a genius.  So much so that this morning I took a closer look at Mr. Cummings's arguments for how he succeeded in his campaign against the EU, Cameron and Osbourne.

When asked Cummings claims that three things helped his Leave campaign:  immigration; the public's anger about the 2008 financial crisis; and the pubic awareness that the Euro was causing problems in other countries like Greece.

Indeed it was these three factors plus the NHS that perhaps did more than the MPs to help Leave win.  According to Cummings, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove came on aboard later after the campaign was in full swing.

Cummings had to keep the politicians, who he does not trust, at a distance from the core management of the operation.  Farage and the speculator Aron Banks are both sidelined, and left to run their own campaign dedicated more to resisting immigration.

Basically Cummings adopts the theme to 'Take Back Control' for the British public, both from Brussels and from the British establishment system itself.: that is the London elite who were perceived as having been responsible for the financial crisis of 2008.

The idea is to engage and energise that fraction of the public who do not normally vote in elections and to discourage those favouring the status quo of Remain.  This involve mathematical targeting based on algorithms and large-scale data analysis.  Then hit them on social media.

'Hit them with £350m and Turkey' proclaims Cummings, addressing his staff from the office table..

Elsewhere, Cummings has argued that the dominant mental model of the Left / Right axis is no longer valid and empirically false.  Particularly among swing voters who he says are both more Left-wing and at the same time more Right wing than most politicians.  Simultaneously they will support more money for the NHS and favour confiscation of property, while favouring harsher action against terrorism or crime than the vast majority of MPs would support.

In last night's Channel Four production Benedict Cumberbatch's Cummings realises that a monster has escaped out of the bottle when Joe Cox was murdered.  Somehow it seems that Humpty Dumpty has fallen off the wall, and British culture is now in pieces.  Cumberbatch's performance was both stunning and sexy.

Meanwhile, Cummings was right to avoid talking about the single market, as no one would understand that because in the end the Brexit vote was sociological rather than economic.  It wasn't a repeat of Clinton's 'It's the economy stupid!'.  It was about seizing control.

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Wife deported from UK despite being married to Briton for 27-years!

A woman living in the UK who has been married to a British man for 27 years has been forcibly removed from the country. Irene Clennell, who made headlines when she was placed in immigration detention, was deported to Singapore on Sunday. Clennell first arrived in London in 1988 and married John, a British man, two years later. They settled in County Durham and had two children together. She now has one grandchild. Her sister-in-law Angela confirmed Clennell had been deported. She said she had been subject to “insensitive and unfair government rules” and that Irene’s husband, her brother, was seriously ill. She told the Guardian: “It’s outrageous what has happened today. I’m appalled by it especially doing it on a Sunday so you can’t contact anyone to try and stop it happening.

Read more: Nicola Slawson, Guardian, http://tiny.cc/hfxhjy

Irene Clennell

Early Day Motion 1004: Deportation of Irene Clennell

That this House condemns the deportation of Irene Clennell, who has been married to a British man for 27 years and has two British sons and a granddaughter, to Singapore, due to her spending periods of time in Singapore caring for her elderly parents and invalidating her residential status; notes that Mrs Clennell was detained at a routine appointment at an immigration reporting centre in Middlesbrough and held prior to deportation in Scottish detention centre Dungavel House, which is infamous for abuse and inhumanity, and on Sunday morning was taken from Dungavel to Singapore, with just £12 in her pocket, without any of her clothes or belongings, leaving behind her sick husband Jon, for whom she is a carer; further notes that this is just one example of the Government's relentless drive towards unrealistic migration caps that don't take real lives into account and tear apart families; and urges the Home Office to develop a more humane approach to immigration rules immediately.

House of Commons: 01/03/2017, http://tiny.cc/qg7jjy

Put Your MP to Work – Demand They Sign EDM  1004

To find your MP go here: https://www.writetothem.com/

Relevance of Immigration in the UK Referendum

by Les May

YESTERDAY the Home Affairs Select Committee chaired by Yvette Cooper launched an inquiry into developing a consensus on an effective immigration policy. 

She said, ‘Immigration is one of the most important issues facing our country and will be central to the Brexit deal. Britain voted for change, especially on free movement, but there has been very little debate about what kind of reforms or immigration control that should now mean or how we get the best deal for the country.’   

Which isn’t strictly true.  In the recent referendum the only question that was asked was whether or not we wanted to leave or stay in the European Union.  There was no question about immigration, the single market, or about the wider question of free movement of people, good, capital and services, so no politician has the right to infer anything from the vote other than that a majority of people voted to leave the EU. This isn’t sophistry, it’s just a fact.   

Fixating on immigration ignores all the other reasons why people may have chosen to vote ‘leave’. Is immigration a significant factor in the growth of inequality? Is it really the reason why some people are paying out a third of their disposable income to rent a house for which they have little security of tenure?  Is it really the reason why some people have become reliant on food banks to ward off starvation?  Is it really the reason that some people feel they have been ‘left behind’ by globalization?  

No! It’s not that ‘they’ have come here to steal our jobs, its that our companies have exported jobs to ‘them’ to line the pockets of CEOs.

In the 1980s the ‘Chicago school’ of economists argued that companies should be run for the benefit of the ‘owners’.  The natural consequence of this was that the proportion of money going to wage earners fell and that to shareholders increased.

 http://www.oecd.org/els/emp/EMO%202012%20Eng_Chapter%203.pdf  

One way of boosting profits still further is to export manufacturing jobs to low wage economies in the Far East.  Check out where your Dyson vacuum was made.   

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/2752100/800-jobs-to-go-as-sad-Dyson-moves-factory-to-Far-East.html  

Whether you think that Cooper belongs to it or not there is a strand in the Labour party the best way to fight off a challenge from UKIP for the so called ‘Labour vote’ is to emulate UKIP and start parroting ‘something must be done about immigration’. The effect of this will be to let the Tories off the hook as architects of our present era of ‘casino capitalism’ where a few winners take all and the rest of us squabble about what is left. 

I’m told that Corbyn has never said anything to indicate that he has any time for ‘populism’.  The indications are that he, and Diane Abbot, will tackle UKIP’s populist policies head on.  But that could bring them into conflict with those in the Labour party who think the best way forward is to become a kind of ‘UKIP Lite’. 

In summer the writers of ‘think pieces’ were speculating that the Right and Left wings would end up fighting over the carcase of the Labour party.  But if the recent referendum told us anything it’s that people do not always feel bound by those traditional allegiances.  How long before those same writers are predicting the death of the Labour party as its splits into those who are willing to scapegoat immigrants to garner votes and those who are not?

UK Political Class in Turmoil!

JEREMY Corbyn Twitted 2-hours ago:

'I completely condemn abuse of MPs of any kind. No abuse is carried out in my name. There is no place for this in society or in our politics.'

WHAT Jeremy Corbyn senses here is that the whole of the UK political class is now in turmoil including himself.  Yesterday, the New York Times ran an editorial entitled 'THE HOLLOW PROMISES OF BREXIT' in which the editor concluded by reviewing what Boris Johnson is now writing in a recent column in The Telegraph:

'The backtracking by Mr. Johnson and his allies has exposed the venality and cynicism of their campaign - unfortunately for Britain, far too late.'

Politicians never were held in very high esteem in England, now the backlash promises to be substantial not just against the Poles and other immigrants, but also the against whole of the political class perhaps with the exception of the SNP.

EU Immigration has no negative impact on British wages, Jobs or Public Services, says LSE report!

A report, by the London School of Economics, has dispelled a number 
of ‘myths’ or misconceptions about the impact of immigration on the 
UK. 

It has been published as part of a series of research publications 
to be released between now and the EU referendum on 23 June. Key 
findings have included that wage variations for British workers have 
little correlation to immigration rates and are instead primarily 
linked to overriding economic factors such as the global economic 
crisis.  

The report’s authors also state that rather than being a 
burden on resources, immigrants pay more in taxes than they use in 
public services and play a vital role in reducing the budget deficit.
Report author Jonathan Wadsworth said: 

“The bottom line, which may surprise many people, is that EU immigration has not harmed the pay, jobs or public services enjoyed by Britons. EU immigrants pay more in 
taxes than they use in public services and therefore they help to 
reduce the budget deficit. So, far from being a necessary evil that we pay to get access to the 
greater trade and foreign investment generated by the EU single 
market, immigration is at worse neutral and at best, another economic 
benefit.”

Read more: Siobhan Fenton, Independent, http://tinyurl.com/h2fzlwq

Self-Harm (Suicide Attempts) In Immigration Removal Centres Reach All time High in 2015!

YARL'S WOOD IMMIGRATION REMOVAL CENTRE

There were 393 attempts (11% increase on 2014) by Immigration detainees across the detention estate, to self-harm throughout 2015, that is an average of more than one a day. Harmondsworth IRC had the highest number 105 and their were 64 attempts in Yarl’s Wood, The Verne 52, Morton Hall 51.

 Two & half thousand (2,597) detainees were on suicide watch during 2015. 11 of these were children detained in The Cedars. Harmondsworth had the highest number 478, Brook House 364, Colnbrook 345, Yarl's Wood 335.

 Their were two deaths both males in Immigration detention is 2015, one in The Verne in August and one Yarl’s Wood family unit in April.

 Source for all data on ‘Self-Harm’ and those on ‘Self-Harm Watch’ Freedom of Information requests.

 Complete statistics for 2015 Here . . . . 

Statistics for the years 2007 through 2014 can be found here . . . .