Cartoon apes want to be free.

Bitcoin, ethereum and other major cryptocurrencies have been hit by a huge crash over the last week, partly triggered by the shock collapse of a major coin.

The bitcoin price has lost 25% over the last month with its biggest rival ethereum down over 30%.

Other smaller cryptocurrencies have been even harder hit—sparking fears others could collapse entirely.
 

Now, as serious economic "shock therapy" warning signs flash, analysts at Wall Street giant Morgan Stanley have predicted prices of digital collectible non-fungible tokens (NFTs) could come under pressure. (Forbes)

As a complete outsider, one thing occurred to me, once I'd picked myself off the floor from laughing myself stupid at the plight of people whose idea of fun was tweeting "Have fun staying poor" at people who didn't fall for the latest iteration of the old get-rich-quick scam. That was how the whole idea of NFTs seems to be a great example of how clever people (or at least ones with specific smarts in areas like IT & cryptography) can also be really dumb. I'm reminded of the classic Larson cartoon of a geeky kid outside the Midvale School for the Gifted, stubbornly pushing at a door marked "pull".

My first thought about attempts to monetise a digital artworks by chaining it to a token of authenticity was how counter it runs to the principle that information wants to be free.* The legacy of some very smart digital pioneers is that reproducing digital information is trivially easy and almost costless. Attempting to make this process hard again is a difficult task which the smart people behind NFTs set themselves - and failed to achieve, as owning an NFT is not the same thing as owning the artwork or image, or text message, or tweet, or whatever else you decide to associated with it:

There is no possible way to see an NFT with your naked eyes. They are immaterial goods that you cannot see but own. NFTs are inherently treacherous and right-clickers, collectors, and artists worldwide are falling for their deception.

My second thought is how obviously mostly socially useless and scammy the NFT pioneers' project is. I say "mostly" because the quote above hints at how you could justify an attempt to make digital art, or any other digital creation, non-fungible. If you're an artist, or the creator of anything in the digital space, it would be easier to profit from your own hard work and talent if it wasn't possible for every rando on the internet to swipe your creation with a right click. If this was just a tool for creators to protect their creations from theft, I'd understand.

But it's not that. This is mostly middle men, trying to turn either someone else's work or some, usually ugly, mediocre, low-effort image they've created themselves into a something with the attributes of a gambling chip crossed with a share in a pyramid scheme which has value only if you can pursuade a horde of greedy and credulous people that it has value.

Other than that, I'll leave the commentary on this story to people who actually have a proper knowledge of IT, cryptography and finance, which I don't. But I think it's still legitimate even for me, as layperson, to take a firm view on this, based on the fact that there are plenty of explanations out there from crypto evangelists and from crypto sceptics who do have some background in this stuff. And I've found the arguments of the sceptics to be lucid where the evangelists are obscure, explanatory where the evangelists are defensive and disinterested, where the evangelists would have an obvious interest in pushing this stuff.

For an actually informed tear-down of NFT/crypto hype, explaining why this stuff mostly doesn't work as advertised (and would be a dystopian nightmare if implemented, even if it did work as advertised), see video below: 

*Here's the full orignal quote from Stewart Brand "On the one hand you have — the point you’re making Woz [Steve Wozniak] — is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable — the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other."

Pro-Brexit voters knew what they were voting for...

...well, sort of.

Like many Remainers, I don't think that many pro-leave voters really knew what the consequences of a Leave vote in the 2016 European Union Referendum would be. But I do think that there's a sense in which they did know what they were voting for.

Leave's strategy of microtargeting many different types of voters with diverse, and often contradictory, concerns, meant that a lot of people did know what they were voting for. People who were targeted with messages abut the (bogus) extra £350 million for the NHS, probably voted for that. Those who thought that migration was the cause of their lives getting worse probably voted based on messages alleging that the UK had open borders, which it could "take back control" of if we left, or that Turkey would imminently be joining the EU, with millions of migrants about to arrive at Dover unless the UK voted out.

I'm not sure how they managed to filter down to the level of people who believed press myths about the EU unilaterally imposing lots of absurd and onerous rules on the UK, although I guess that their data gurus had ways of finding out who was sharing content from the Mail, Express or Telegraph web sites. Hell, they even had messages targeted at environmentalists and animal lovers, pretending that leaving the EU would, in some way, help to save polar bears.

So I'm sure that lots of people, on an individual level, knew what they were voting for. What they didn't know is that other people were voting for different, often incompatible things, all of projected on to the deliberately vague concept of Leave

The other thing they didn't know was that the people who were inducing them to vote for everything from more nurses to more polar bears had zero intention of delivering these things. The real reasons behind the campaign to leave were never shared with voters, from retaining secrecy around money hidden in offshore tax havens, to stripping voters of their workplace rights, freedom of movement, protection from dangerous products and access to free health care. All for the benefit of the super rich and the profits of unaccountable, predatory corporations.

It's a point that Remain campaigners should bear in mind - the "you didn't know what you were voting for" message might be counter-productive for people who responded directly to a simple targeted message. Reduced to this short, simple form, it sounds very much like "you were just stupid", which is never going to win hearts and minds.

In short, don't focus on what Leave voters didn't know, but focus on the promises that Leave politicians and cheerleaders broke, and keep on breaking.

"Oh, won't somebody PLEASE think of the polar bears?"

A special nation, just like all the others

"Just after the referendum someone predicted that the brexit negotiations would be a process of 'controlled capitulation'. Which has come to pass. At least our egregious sense of national exceptionalism is being nailed ever deeper into the cross of astounded leaver righteousness."

Perhaps the most egregious thing about the United Kingdom's sense of national exceptionalism is that it's almost exactly like everybody else's sense of national exceptionalism. This, for example, is what "taking back control" looks like in Viktor Orbán's Hungary:

A few weeks ago, in a small town in Hungary, two Catholic nuns were stopped on the street and berated by people yelling, “Migrants! Migrants!” After pushing the old ladies a bit, they called the police, believing they had seen Muslim women in a burqa and hijab. The police saved the nuns from the Christian crowd.

Those eejits might have been wearing the Magyar version of the MAGA hat but, from the UK, this sort of thing  looks depressingly familiar. Remember this story from 2014?

Nigel Farage’s local Ukip branch has rebuked the BBC for its ingrained liberal bias in holding a straw poll on the party leader in front of a London mosque. The mosque in question was Westminster Cathedral...

...This isn’t the first-time a rightwing party has got its buildings confused. The English Defence League mistook Brighton’s Royal Pavilion for a mosque last year.

Different flag, same stupid.

Lose that flag and other people's national exceptionalism starts to look a whole lot like our own:

The Orbán government’s first legislative move is the Stop Soros Act, which will force human rights groups to register as foreign agents and submit to regular police surveillance, fiduciary controls, and punitive taxes. Groups that have absolutely nothing to do with immigration — those looking after Hungarian citizens’ human rights, advocating education and prison reform, representing the homeless and ethnic and religious minorities, etc. — will be persecuted [Brits may not be able to get a decent cup of tea on the Continent, but at they'll at least have enough of a "hostile environment" to make them feel right at home]...

...Orbán’s semi-dictatorship ... unlike its post-Stalinist predecessor, is not statist or centralizing. Its guiding principles are arbitrary, capricious rule and, above all, informality. The real centers of power in Orbán’s Hungary are formally independent institutions (state foundations, semi-private companies, purportedly private firms living on state credit) that are outside the control of normal government administration and of judicial control as well [in the UK, think how policy is shaped by a shady spider's web of obscure, unaccountable interest groups - the Legatum Institute, the European Research Group, the TaxPayers' Alliance, Migration Watch, the Adam Smith Institute...]. Meanwhile, regular administration is being dismantled and well-trained civil servants are being thrown out in droves ["Brexit minister fuels conspiracy about 'rogue' civil servants"] . Drafting of bills happens behind the backs of ostensibly leading politicians and bureaucrats, and rushed through parliament [Henry VIII clauses, anybody?] — usually without discussion.

There's nothing special and unique about people insisting that they're special and unique.

Wake me up...

... I'm having this really disturbing dream where Ukip have turned the whole UK into a creepily unfunny, racist 1970s sitcom and put Jim Davidson in charge of the Foreign Office:

UK government guide advises people being deported to Jamaica to fake Caribbean accent to avoid attention

Wait a minute ... that was no dream...

The Windrush scandal is Theresa May’s creation, borne of an innate inability to equate ‘immigrant’ with ‘person’. It’s a hefty accusation, I know, but it makes sense of almost everything she’s done since 2010. Lying about a cat; Go Home vans; subsuming Ukip; EU citizens as cards.

— James O'Brien (@mrjamesob) April 17, 2018

Welcome to my nightmare.

"Nudge, nudge, wink, wink..."

Let's run with that unstated assumption that "those ‘choice architects’ claiming that they know what is best for society and individual citizens are exempt from that theory [i.e. nudge theory]."

Nudgers are, by definition, more powerful than the people they nudge, and more powerful generally means richer. If the poor are nudged, for their own good, does that mean that everything is now OK, because their self-evidently superior betters can be trusted to act rationally and reasonably at all times? How's rule by enlightened plutocrats working out?

Then there's the outsized role that rich peoples' irrational prejudices play in the policy sphere: whether that's Wahabism and its systematic oppression of women, or American hydrocarbon barons' climate denial, Mike Pence's Dominionism, Gwyenth Paltrow's multi-million-dollar science-denial business, Putin's violent aggression against anyone who criticizes the Russian Orthodox church, or Prince Charles's absurd belief in homeopathy. When the richest of the rich can swing policy outcomes just by insisting that they're right and everyone else is wrong, evidence is unceremoniously dumped and we all have to survive the shear where uncaring reality meets uncompromising ideology.

It's worse than that, actually, because when the shear occurs, the rich don't just admit they were wrong and move on. They jail people who point out their mistakes, get their paid-for lawmakers to defund research into their pet theories, and deny, deny, deny, until the seas rise and measles kill our kids.

Cory Doctorow

Either that, or they're wittering on about the urgent need to create a massive network of enormous pneumatic tubes, so people can travel in individual pods, because if you catch a bus, like normal people, you just might end up sitting next to a serial killer. Or falling for quacks who promise them eternal youth if they inject their ageing bodies with young peoples' blood.

It's almost as if unchecked inequality, which lets the irresponsible whims of the few trump the interests of the many, is more of a problem than the alleged fecklessness of the poor.

"...say no more!"

Boris and Vlad's PR agency

Is this what Mrs Mayday meant by a "red, white and blue Brexit"?

Both Sanni and Wylie have also confirmed that the harvested information has been shared with Kremlin linked entities.

These could include the Internet Research Agency troll farm in St Petersburg, accused by Robert Mueller and the US Supreme Court of manipulating the Trump vote in the US.

With a budget of approximately $1.25 million, the Internet Research Agency is mostly funded by Oligarch Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin, linked to the three state run TV networks in Russia and known by the Russian media as “Putin’s Chef.”

Prighozin, who held clandestine meetings with Robert Mercer in the Virgin Islands during the Trump Presidential Campaign, also has a major interest in Wagner Group, the corporate mercenary army implicated in war crimes in Donbas, Crimea and Syria.

Former Russian spy Sergei Skripal was poisoned, together with his daughter Yulia and a British policeman, in Salisbury this month using a deadly nerve agent developed by the Russian military.

A source close to Skripal has said he was investigating the collusion between the Internet Research Agency, AIQ, Cambridge Analytica and its parent company, SCL.

Roger Cottrell.

Having already photoshopped an image of Corbyn onto a red Kremlin background and - purely fortuitously - softened the outline of his cap to make it look like a fur hat, I presume that the BBC, in the interests of balance, will now be giving Boris, the Vote Leave Commissar, a similar Russia-themed graphic makeover?

What d'you mean "Nyet"?

Hmmm ... It's almost as if the British establishment will let a chap get away with almost anything, so long as he attended Eton or Marlborough.

Who nudges the nudgers?

Nobody, because they're rational and unbiased, honest:

It struck me during Chris Wylie’s commentary about the use of “behavioural science” that his language reflected the central ideas of nudge theories, he was using words like “heuristics”, “cognitive bias” and so on. He outlined the basic premise of nudge, too – the idea that humans are fundamentally ‘irrational’. (Yet curiously, those ‘choice architects’ claiming that they know what is best for society and individual citizens are exempt from that theory).

And if you believe that you're welcome to trust them.

"Taking back control of our borders" Humpty Dumpty style

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."

Apparently Humpty Dumpty and Chris Grayling have more in common than their shared resemblance to an egg:

The UK government is reportedly considering making Britain's borders completely open to the European Union after Brexit if it crashes out of negotiations with no deal in place...

...Transport Secretary Chis Grayling last night insisted there will be no additional checks on Britain's border no matter what form Brexit takes.

"We will maintain a free-flowing border at Dover, we will not impose checks at the port, it is utterly unrealistic to do so," the Brexit-voting Conservative minister told audience members.

"We don't check lorries now, we're not going to be checking lorries in the future."

They also both seem to live in Wonderland and appear to have been taking a few too many puffs of whatever it was that caterpillar was smoking:

Two games, two bloody difficult women

Ken Clarke did Theresa May a huge favour back in 2016, when he was overheard saying to a colleague, "Theresa is a bloody difficult woman, but you and I worked with Margaret Thatcher." First, he made himself look like a sexist throwback, while giving Mrs May a bit of free feminist credibility to appropriate in the spirit of #nastywoman, or "Nevertheless, she persisted."

Second, in a more specifically Conservative context, namechecking May in the same breath as Margaret Thatcher must, for many Conservatives, have sounded like the ultimate accolade. If they had any doubts before, the children of the Thatcher revolution probably shelved them at the prospect of Maggie 2.0 going forth to slay the Brussels dragon with one swing of her mighty iron handbag.

I'm no Conservative, and certainly no fan of Margaret Thatcher, but even I can see how Clarke's careless comparison must have burnished May's reputation at a critical time. After all, Thatcher fans can point to the negotiating record of Bloody Difficult Woman 1.0 and say "look, she went to Europe and got us our rebate." And they'd be right. That actually happened.

Of course, since the Tories booted up Maggie 2.0, AKA the Maybot, the new model has failed to extract any similar concessions from Europe. Disappointed Thatcher fans will probably put this failure down to her lacking the conviction and resolve of the original Iron Lady, but at this point, I'd start to disagree with them.

Yes, Margaret Thatcher negotiated some meaningful concessions from Europe where May, playing an even higher-stakes game, has so far failed. But I don't put May's failure down to personal deficiencies. Rather, I think that she's playing a different game to the one Thatcher won and, in this new game, the odds are stacked against her and the House almost always wins:

Here’s the idea: two-level game tactics, in which you reduce your win-set with a view to maximising the chances of your preferred option carrying the day, work if everyone prefers staying together over not finding a solution. This is known as a battle of the sexes game: John wants to go to the football game while Mary wants to go to the theatre, but both want to do something together rather than go alone. A battle of the sexes game is about the unequal distribution of outcomes when both want to cooperate. So, as long as the UK is in the EU, being a slightly recalcitrant member works in its favour because the rest of the EU wants a deal more than no deal.

While it works well as long as the UK wants to remain an EU member, the two-level game tactics backfire when you are negotiating leaving the EU. Drawing red lines when you don’t want to cooperate anymore is massively counterproductive, even if you negotiate among equals but certainly if the other party controls the process. Since there is de facto no second level anymore – the UK has had its Brexit vote and, as Theresa May reminds us almost daily, Brexit means Brexit – the UK no longer is able to use that as a way of forcing other EU member states to inch closer to its preferred outcome. It is, indeed, much simpler to negotiate opt-outs during forty years of membership than opt-ins when leaving the EU.

Thatcherites are, I think, wrong to put May's failure down to a lack of bloody mindedness. As far as I can see, she's got enough of that to be either praised for her resolve, or damned for her stubbornness, depending on your point of view. What she doesn't bring to the table is a deterrent. When Thatcher negotiated her rebate, her negotiating partners gave ground because they had a relationship to save. Mrs May has not only filed for divorce, but has said, repeatedly, "Divorce means divorce."

It reminds me of that bit in The Life of Brian, where a high priest, or some such cleric, is sentencing an old man to be stoned to death for blasphemously uttering the name of Jehovah. When the old man accidentally blasphemes some more, the cleric says "You're only making it worse for yourself!" No longer having anything to lose, the old man replies "Making it worse?! How could it be worse?! Jehovah! Jehovah! Jehovah!" In the end, the cleric himself ends up being stoned, but I guess it's a bit late to remind the vicar's daughter that some serious self-examination is generally recommended before casting the first stone:

"We have heard rumblings"

It's not my place to tell other people how to do their jobs, but what the hell. Here's a template for schools, showing how not to communicate with parents:

"Re: staffing for next year. All staff are fully qualified and experienced teachers who we check carefully. We have heard rumblings from parents who may have concerns. Please come and speak to Mrs [redacted] so you can be reassured. No negative comments on here please. We always endeavour to listen and work with you. Thank you [redacted]."

"Why don't we just put any information that parents might need to hear in one place, on the school website?"

"Because we're down with the kids; we're all about social media, sharing and interactivity! Let's create a Facebook group and use that to keep in touch with parents! They'll love it! They can tell us how great we are, share cute photos and everything!"

"But what about parents who don't do Facebook?"

"La, la, la, not listening!"

"And if you invite people to interact, doesn't that create a systemic risk of people sharing things you'd prefer they spoke privately to staff about? Isn't the result just curated, fake interactivity, that pretends to welcome sharing and feedback, but patronises parents like naughty five year olds if they say anything that isn't positive?"

"BORING!!!"

For the record, I haven't used Facebook in about a decade and don't know the specifics of what the parents in question had been "rumbling" about. I just think the whole set-up is asking for trouble, as well as being annoying to non-Facebook users like me.

People shouldn't need a Facebook account in order to do important things like keeping in touch with their children's schools.

Ukip - probably worth less than nothing + VAT

Back in September, Ukip's latest ex-leader, Henry Whatsisname, boasted that the party had avoided becoming the "UK Nazi Party" by astutely electing him, instead of the candidate who'd run promising a Final Solution™ to the Muslim Question.

Poor Henry

Sadly, we didn't have long to get to know Henry. If he had any interesting policy positions, beyond being anti-Nazi and pro-badger strangling, we didn't have time to find out before his tenure ended prematurely, not with a whimper, but with a bang, when he was caught banging a glamour model who was into experimenting with policy positions at some uncomfortable distance from anti-Nazism.

“I was working as a racist in a cocktail bar, when I met you” pic.twitter.com/1iRlBaLh4b

— Scott Ballantyne (@Moosedog23) January 18, 2018

A new leader has yet to be elected, but given the new acting leader's keen interest in the Muslim Question and fondness for "I'm not anti-Semitic, just anti-Soros" dog-whistles, it sounds as if Henry's warning about the "UK Nazi party" wasn't too far from the truth. According to some of the lovely people at Kipper Central, a Gerard Batten-led Ukip could quickly become a Nazi tribute act, even attracting its own cadre of ex-Friekorps types, in the shape of entryists from something called Veterans Against Terrorism (VAT):

Veterans Against Terrorism held a march in Newcastle yesterday and below is a report on that march. Significantly for UKIP they also praise our new interim leader, Gerard Batten as a “working class man of the people” who will “transform the Party”.

They pledge to join the Party en masse and take part in that transformation as committed activists as per our previous report that they will join in their thousands and set UKIP on track to consign the Labour Party to the “dustbin of history”. 

Angry veterans on the streets. That usually goes well...

Are these the new Stormtroopers who'll take to the streets to intimidate the traitors, the enemies of the people, the Jews and the Reds who'll be accused of stabbing the Fatherland in the back, once Brexit inevitably delivers hardship and humiliation, instead of the promised victory?

Actually, I'm not yet that worried. The most significant problem is that Ukip seems to be bust - they couldn't even afford to pay their last leader a salary, they're on the hook for £200k as a result of the Jane Collins libel case and the consensus is that they probably don't have enough left in the kitty to fund the forthcoming leadership election.

And they don't have that many members - about 34,000 as of December 2016, a number which has almost certainly reduced, given their poor showing in the last election and comically inept post-Farage leadership. Even if VAT march to the Kippers' rescue, they have a maximum of 8,500 members (that figure came from the Express, so should be treated as being as unreliably exaggerated as the paper's hyperventilating weather warnings). In which case Ukip + VAT = fewer members than the Green Party. And our first past the post system is rarely kind to third parties, let alone sixth* parties without any money or a single sitting MP.

Without funding, I think that any Fascists hoping for the resurgence of an even more alt-right-ist Ukip will be disappointed. As will some leftists and Remainers - let's face it, standing up to Nazis sounds badass cool.

Unfortunately, our most powerful enemies are a lot less impressively evil -  the hapless, broken automaton otherwise known as the Prime Minister, those badly-drawn P G Wodehouse caricatures, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson, David Davis, who looks like an elderly uncle who's the only one in the family not to realise he's losing the plot, Liam Fox, who never had the plot in the first place, and the various faceless policy wonks and empty suits inhabiting the spiders' web of obscurely-funded right-wing think tanks and lobby groups without which terrible ideas like Brexit would never happen.






*In sixth place, by membership, behind Labour, the Conservatives (I assume, although they don't publish membership data in their annual accounts), the SNP, the Lib Dems and the Greens.

Fishing with a golden hook

I can't speak for anybody else, but having had a few days to digest Boris Johnson's recent attempt to reach out to Remainers and set out a positive case for Brexit, I'm not convinced.

The Brexiteers' loud and aggressive campaign against freedom of movement for other Europeans won't, Johnson assures us, cause the Continentals to inconvenience UK nationals trying to exercise their freedom to move between jobs, cheap stag nights, or cultural attractions in any part of Europe that takes their fancy. And if you believe that one, Boris has a bridge he'd like to sell you...

I'm more convinced by the rhetoric of another lofty patrician, which our classically-educated Foreign Secretary would have done well to heed before he got himself, and the rest of the country, into this fix:

It was a principle of his that no campaign or battle should ever be fought unless more could clearly be gained by victory than lost by defeat; and he would compare those who took great risks in the hope of gaining some small advantage to a man who fishes with a golden hook, though aware that nothing he can catch will be valuable enough to justify its loss.

Sound, if platitudinous, advice from Augustus Caesar, (according to Suetonius). When every Brexit scenario modelled in the government's own assessments looks worse than the status quo, it seems to me that the Brexiteers are fishing with a golden hook.

WTF, PFI?

When Carillon collapsed with a mighty clang, it prompted some people to have second thoughts about the wisdom of Private Finance Initiative contracts. Look at the original thinking behind PFI and you start to wonder why anybody ever had first thoughts about this way of doing things:

...why did we ever enter PFI contracts in the first place? The answer is provided on page 11 of the NAO report: PFI is off-balance sheet for national accounts purposes, which means it “results in lower recorded levels of government debt and public spending in the short term”.

The problem was that Serious People believed public spending and government debt in the UK were dangerously, unsustainably high.* They lay awake at night worrying about the terrible debts future generations would inherit, if we frittered their birthright away on fripperies like schools, roads and hospitals. What did they do about this alleged existential, intergenerational threat?

No worries - they had a cunning plan. Hide the up-front costs, so it looked as if they weren't spending the money they really were spending, then saddle future generations with the cost of running and maintaining this off-balance-sheet infrastructure, as well as handing over a massive wodge of public money in rent to a bunch of private companies who'll be billing our kids and their kids, long after the Serious People have moved on, their reputation for prudent management of the public finances intact.

So Serious People solved the perceived problem of handing whopping debts on to the next generation by making current spending seem to disappear, through the magic of creative accounting, then ... er ... handing whopping debts on to the next generation.

That's so mental, it's almost impressive.




*Plenty of people have argued convincingly that the idea of runaway public spending was wasn't true when the notion of PFI was first dreamed up and still isn't true.

"We're going to win so much, WE'RE going to be sick and tired of winning"

Trump didn't want to win the election:

"Once he lost, Trump would be both insanely famous and a martyr to Crooked Hillary."

Johnson didn't want to win the EU Referendum:

"Once he lost, Johnson would be both insanely famous and a martyr to Project Fear."

In Trump's case, we have to rely on the word of Michael Wolff and his sources, when they say that team Trump reacted to victory with shock and disbelief. In Johnson's case, we've actually seen the terrified "What have I done?" expression on his face, as he reacted to his victory like a man who's suddenly and unexpectedly been asked to deliver a funeral oration.

Having come first in a competition he never wanted to win, it now looks obvious that he views the prospect of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory with relief, not disappointment:

The foreign secretary has reportedly told friends that he would rather stay in the EU than accept a soft Brexit.

According to The Sun, Boris Johnson told allies that any Brexit result which left Britain outside of the EU, but still closely aligned to it, would be a "total waste of time," adding that "I’d rather us stay in than leave like that."

A separate report by Politico on Monday confirms this, stating that Johnson told allies that calls for Britain to remain closely aligned to EU rules and regulations after Brexit were "mad," adding that: "You’d be better off staying in."

He reportedly told friends that he believes Theresa May would be "worn down" by civil servants and persuaded to accept a bad Brexit deal that would leave Britain in a similar relationship to the EU as Norway.

Friends of Johnson have previously told Business Insider that the foreign secretary never had any intention of leaving the EU, but joined the Leave campaign purely out of his ambition to win the Conservative leadership. 

If you believe the Eurosceptic UK press, the chief enemies of Brexit are the treacherous "Remoaners" who voted and campaigned against leaving the EU. I'm not so sure.

With a few honourable exceptions (like the dogged and courageous Gina Miller), I think the Remain side have been pretty ineffective (such is the prevailing Brexit orthodoxy that even the most pro-Remain MPs routinely preface their criticisms with a feeble "Of course, nobody's trying to block Brexit", before coming up with some half-baked waffle about "a Brexit that works for everybody", whatever such a fantastic beast might look like).

But maybe, just maybe, the true enemies of Brexit come from inside the Brexit camp, from self-identified Brexiteers like Johnson and 'ol frog-face, who publicly claim to be with the program, but are secretly hoping it will go away, so they can forget about the complexity, hard work and harder choices that delivering Brexit would actually entail, and get back to their comfort zone of cheerfully fact-free scapegoating, while playing the victim from a position of cosseted privilege.

Henry and Wallis

Henry Whatsisname's leadership of Ukip continues to go from strength to strength. After a strong start, when Henry built his reputation as a very stable genius on that impressive boast that he could strangle a badger with his bare hands, Henry went on to demonstrate his family-friendly credentials by cheating on his wife and kids with a foxy Ukip groupie 25 years his junior.

As any fule kno, there's nothing the public love more than a celebrity romance (just look at Prince Harry and Meghan Markle), so I'm sure that by showing his human side, Henry has astutely burnished the glamour of his führerschaft to an even more impressive sheen. I confidently expect bunting and street parties to follow the announcement that Henry and Jo Marney are now an item.

The happy couple

Already Henry's new companion and soulmate is helping the great leader in his stated mission of leading the party towards definitely-not-racist respectability:

UKIP has suspended the girlfriend of party leader Henry Bolton after she apparently made racist remarks about Prince Harry's fiancee Meghan Markle.

The Mail on Sunday has published a series of messages sent by Jo Marney.

In them, the 25-year-old model said Ms Markle would "taint" the Royal Family, that she had a "tiny brain" and that black people were ugly.

Ms Marney apologised and said her messages had been taken out of context.

Henry didn't want to comment. What will Henry do, if forced to choose between his duty and the woman he loves? It's all very Edward and Mrs Simpson.

"fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists", as somebody once said...

Although, to be fair to Henry's Wallis, she may be a contemptible racist, but she isn't any more racist than the current President of the United States, or the UK's Foreign Secretary. Interesting times.





*Update and afterthought - Ms Marney contends that her remarks have been taken "out of context." Other than as a satirical parody of the sort of things you might hear a racist muppet say - which I assume wasn't her intention - can anybody explain what sort of context might excuse such remarks? Help me out, I'm struggling here.

The special relationship

Racist pillock who called Africans "piccaninnies" with "watermelon smiles" supports racist pillock who called African countries "shitholes."

The USA and the UK. Two countries divided by a common outrage.

Post-geography, or just Poe?

Apparently, somebody didn't get an atlas for Christmas. I genuinely can't decide whether this is as stupid as it looks, or whether we're being trolled, maybe in order to generate headlines about anything except the actually existing mess this project's in.

Whatever you're up to, Liam, you just gave a whole new meaning to the familiar phrase "Fox geography howler."

While we're on the topic of Poe's Law, here's something to contemplate the next time somebody accuses Lefties of being humourless, politically-correct killjoys. It's the definition of Poe's Law, according to those whacky funsters at Conservapedia:

"Poe’s Law is an Internet adage that inappropriately compares God's mighty handiwork during the Creation to an insipid genre of satire."*

I guess that if you want to believe in things like trickle down, austerity and Fox News headlines, and still keep a straight face, a total sense of humour bypass must be pretty much your only option.




*No link from me - if you really want to rot your brain, you know where to go and you can dive in at your own risk.

Post-fact blues

"'Iconic' blue British passport to return after Brexit" says the BBC headline.

Desperate to salvage the tiniest scrap of anything that smells like good news from the wreckage of their shambolic project, Brexiteers are hailing this trivial change to the colour of a travel document as if it was the arrival of the Messiah come to bring peace on Earth and goodwill to all. "Hark!" the herald Nigel sings "Happy Brexmas! ... In the 2016 referendum, we wanted our passports back. Now we've got them back!"

What this headline (along with all the others) doesn't make clear is the small, but very important, fact that the UK could easily have done this symbolic makeover without leaving the EU:

...the most headdesk thing about the whole “we want our passports back” discussion is that there’s no EU requirement to adopt burgundy passports. It’s a voluntary guideline which member states are free to ignore. Croatia, for example, has retained its existing dark blue passports. It would have been completely possible and legal for David Cameron ahead of the Brexit referendum to say “we understand patriotic feelings yada yada yada, so whatever the result of the vote is, passports will be dark blue from 2020”.

All I want for Christmas is a public broadcaster that doesn't mindlessly recycle fact-free delusions with the solemnity of an exceptionally pious cleric reciting the Gospels. But it looks as if I've got more chance of finding a live unicorn that shits rainbows under the Christmas tree this year.


Update - kudos to Lizzie Dearden at the Independent for putting the record straight:

Blue passports could have been re-introduced without Brexit, Government admits

And for balance, here are some of my favourite reactions to this unnecessary and unimpressive piece of window dressing from the end of Lizzie's article:

...Neil Coyle, the Labour MP for Bermondsey and Old Southwark, commented: “A new passport that make holidays more expensive, limits where people can work or study & costs billions.”

Many British passport holders born after 1988 took to social media to point out that they never owned the old passport.

“Couldn’t give a toss what colour my passport is,” said actor Samuel West. “Care much more about losing the right to live and work in 26 countries.”

Quite.

The sincerest form of flattery

Here’s an idea: let’s abolish the wheel. Let’s escape the tyranny of the circular device, and spend the money saved on axles, spokes and hubs on — oh, I don’t know — the National Health Service (NHS). Let’s take back control of rotation! But wait a minute. This can’t be done overnight. We shall still need some means of transporting ourselves and our goods until we have formally renounced the wheel, but before we have agreed on a new device. There’ll probably need to be an “implementation period” in which we remain “aligned” with the existing circular format.

Then, when we’ve finally got rid of the old system — let freedom ring! — we’ll need a new, bespoke mechanism. What we’ll want is our own round component that rolls around an axis; an independently designed disc that turns reliably to enable easy movement. Something that gyrates smoothly along the ground. I wonder what we should call it.

Matthew d’Ancona, in a piece titled "Theresa May’s new Brexit campaign is a mirage", published in the Gulf Times, where they presumably know a thing or two about mirages.

What seems to be going on is a reversed version of the branding exercise that a certain discount supermarket does when it wants to make its cheaper own-brand products look as close as possible to their popular branded equivalents, without actually crossing the line into outright counterfeiting:

Alcafé Gold Roast is a work of fiction. Any similarity to other brands of coffee, instant or gold, is purely coincidental.

But where the discount retailer wants its own products to look just like their almost-identical equivalents, the Brexit Delivery Team want their product to look completely unlike the thing they're desperately trying to duplicate in excruciating detail:

Government: "We are proud to announce an innovative new form of circular component, intended to rotate on an axle bearing."

Every Reman and Leave voter who's still awake: "It's a wheel, isn't it?"

Government: "No, it's totally not a wheel. Our old wheel was blue, with yellow stars on it. This is an entirely novel type of component - look, it's red, white and blue!"

Still, at least the government has found an excellent way to unite the whole country - simultaneously patronise and disappoint everybody who voted to leave the EU and everybody who voted to stay. Anyway, good luck trying to get your novel innovation past the patent office, guys.

If David Davis has been telling the truth all along, it's time to panic

As Arthur C Clarke said about intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe, two frightening scenarios exist:

"Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying."

After David Davis's appearance before the Brexit select committee yesterday, I think that the search for intelligent life in the Department for Exiting the European Union yields a similarly terrifying pair of binary options:

1. David Davis is telling the truth now, when he says that the impact studies and analysis don't exist, but he was lying in the past when he said they existed in "excruciating detail"

2. David Davis is lying now, when he says that the impact studies and analysis don't exist, but he was telling the truth in the past when he said they did.

1. is terrifying because it means that the UK is taking the most significant peacetime decision in its history with virtually no planning or risk assessment. 2. is terrifying because the risk assessments exist, but Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union is pretending they don't, presumably because their conclusions are too frightening to share with the public.

I bet they do exist, in some form or other. I bet Davis has decided he'd rather take heat for misleading Parliament and the public than come clean about what Government knows Brexit means. https://t.co/DARDqHtgBF

— Jo Maugham QC (@JolyonMaugham) 6 December 2017

Unfortunately for fans of neat correspondences, and for people who think that surely by now we must have reached rock bottom, a third possibility exists:

3. David Davis is telling the truth now, when he says that the impact studies and analysis don't exist and he was also telling the truth in the past when he said they did.

3. could be true if DExEU did analyse the probable impact, but the results were so horrific that they subsequently destroyed their work and ordered everybody who knew of its existence never to speak of it again. In that case, Davis could then have been technically telling the truth all along, with implications that are even more terrifying than scenarios 1. and 2.

I now think they DID exist and he’s destroyed them.

— Kate Edmonds #BFPE (@kate_edmonds_CS) 6 December 2017

Logically, there's a fourth possibility, that Davis was lying in the past and is lying now, but this one doesn't really make much sense to me. DExEU could have failed to do its homework when Davis was confidently assuring everybody that it was all well in hand, then cobbled something together at the last minute, but if that's true and the work exists, why stand before the committee and pretend that his department hasn't done it? Unless, or course, the conclusions of the department's  last-minute impact studies and analysis were as terrifying as 2., or as utterly horrific as 3.

Whatever the right answer, just be grateful that you're not David Davis. Or, as Monty Python sang:

So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth;
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth!