Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Tamas]

It make me wonder if, while we're all wondering about whether we're now just living in America's culture wars if we're actually in Australia's?

The common denominator in all three: Rupert Murdoch's media and influence apparatus.

If only Murdoch wasn't around - people's base instincts and others' desire to profit from them would disappear overnight.

[Sheilbh]

Ongoing this country

I suspect a solid 20% of the country doesn't just think we should stop seeing people outside of our immediate household probably don't think there's any reason to ever lift that restriction:


Also most people have now heard of the Geronimo the alpaca news and they overwhelmingly think he should not be killed. Of that group 60% think Boris Johnson (the Prime Minister! ) should intervene to save Geronimo's life:


I'm seeing people drawing attention to Phoenix the Calf during the 2001 foot and mouth epidemic. There was a slaughter on Phoenix's farm to stop the spread of foot and mouth. Most of the herd were killed (except for a couple of newborn calves). Phoenix should have been killed and was put on the pile of slaughtered animals. But must have been missed as, after the agriculture ministry goons left, Phoenix got up from the pile of corpses and tottered back into the field.

Policy - to prevent the spread of foot and mouth - was that the ministry should come back and kill Phoenix. It became a huge cause celebre (again tabloid campaign, Labour MPs warning that they'd lose their seats if Phoenix was killed). The Mirror launched a "Save Phoenix from the Ashes" campaign, a former government minister compared the ministry to Daleks, the National Farmer's Union said they were making King Herod look like a humanitarian. The farmer's said it was a disgrace to treat an animal this way (farmers who raise animals for slaughter!) and said they'd need to be forced to comply by a court order and the police.

In the end Tony Blair intervened and changed MAFF's slaughter policy nationally - Phoenix survived

[Josquius]

The phoenix case was a bit different though no? That this poor still living calf would be dumped on a pile with his dead family... Something went seriously wrong there. That's fucked up.
Slaughter is OK as it's meant to be dome without causing unnecessary distress to the animals.

[Sheilbh]

The phoenix case was a bit different though no? That this poor still living calf would be dumped on a pile with his dead family... Something went seriously wrong there. That's fucked up.
Slaughter is OK as it's meant to be dome without causing unnecessary distress to the animals.

Fair - but the campaign to reprieve Phoenix and Downing Street intervening is pretty similar.

But in terms of Geronimo - we don't eat alpaca. He was never raised for slaughter or with slaughter on his farm. In both cases it's necessary because of you know animal pandemic

[Sheilbh]

This is very meta - it's an article about believing a story because it confirms your biases and is really good, and it confirms my biases and is really good. So I have no idea what is reality and what is not. But, if it wasn't true I feel like the Spectator would have come out against this very strongly and laughed it off. So far they haven't so it may be true and wow

I think I posted about Marcus Rashford's comments about an upcoming Spectator story (and I feel for him because he is an innocent in this) - but this is the background to that statement:

What ever happened to that Spectator article about Marcus Rashford?
   dannie grufferty

You may recall the hoo-hah the other week about Marcus Rashford and a Spectator story. Rashford tweeted that the Spectator were preparing to run a story about him but strangely the story then never appeared. So what was it all about, and what happened to the story? Well I'll have to take you back a few months...

The events I describe were born of a familiar cause. I speak of course of the seemingly never-ending search for ways to keep oneself occupied during lockdown. I noticed one evening that The Spectator, that much (formerly?) revered political journal, had launched a new enterprise, Wokeyleaks, heralded as "A regular column by an anonymous whistle-blower operating deep within the Social Justice Movement", asking for leaks of "classified information" about "woke culture".

I know what you are thinking; Ah that'll simply be more lazy clickbait from a right-wing, culture-war-mongering magazine. Well, your thoughts are wrong! What they were doing with Wokeyleaks was actually rather brave.*

One has to admire the bravery, or audacity of a publication, previously edited by the Prime Minister and with Andrew Neil as Chairman, suggesting that it is no longer part of the establishment.

Bygone are the heady days where column inches were filled by the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Graham Greene, or my personal favourite, Debo, Duchess of Devonshire. In their place are now more nuanced intellectual heavyweights, like Brendan O'Neill, Douglas Murray, and Rod Liddle. These days rather than holding forth at Simpsons in the Strand, one is more likely to find the contributors of this noble organ spending their time in the trenches of Twitter, fighting on the vanguard in the new culture wars; I speak of course of The Tepid Wars.

For those of you unfamiliar with The Tepid Wars, there are many brave acts of resistance one can engage in to give two fingers to "The Establishment". But perhaps it was The Spectator's Rod Liddle who displayed the most courage, when he smoked, in his bedroom.

I digress, sorry. So The Spectator, keen to ensure they stayed hip, relevant, and down with the kids were trying something new - that which can send pillars of the establishment crashing down; investigative journalism!**

Wokeyleaks was asking for people to send in "anonymous" examples of "woke-culture war crimes" from workplaces, and other settings. Lol, what losers, I thought to myself (Can one think a lol? Remember, it was the second (or third?) lockdown and I was very bored). So I decided to amuse myself by sending them some fake stories. Surely they wouldn't take this seriously, I mused, as I hammered out frankly ludicrous claims about the great and the good; and thought little more of it.

A few weeks later I was somewhat surprised to receive a reply.

The Wokeyleaks writer "Edward Snowflake they/them" (hahaha do you get it, very witty, lol) wanted to know more about the "gossip" I had. Out of all the bizarre stories I'd claimed to have, the one that interested them related to a certain Marcus Rashford and the talent agency he worked with at the time, Roc Nation.

I was surprised to get a response. Not surprised that The Spectator wanted me to enlist in the Tepid Wars, but more because of the content of my emails. But then The Spectator seem very interested in Marcus Rashford, (I like how they frame their headlines as entirely innocent rhetorical questions).

    [At this point, just for the avoidance of doubt, I should make very clear that nothing in any of my emails was true, and I have had no contact with Roc Nation, Marcus Rashford, or anyone connected to them.]

The "wokeyleaks"

I'd claimed Marcus Rashford's interest in campaigning to keep free school meals was inspired by his mother being a member of the Communist Party who wanted to nationalise all food. But I'd also said (in the same email) that the food poverty campaign was nothing to do with Rashford at all, but was thought up by a bunch of wealthy white liberals at Roc Nation who had "opened his [Rashford's] eyes to the reality of food poverty". (Perhaps for The Spectator, relying on free school meals (FSM) as a child wasn't enough to embolden you to action, it still takes the white middle classes to convince you?)

Things began to snowball. (Or should I say snowflake?? Hahaha lol). To give some idea of how seriously this was being taken, let me quote from an email from "Wokeyleaks" dated months later, on 1st June 2021;

    I'm so sorry this is taking so long to make happen. We've been waiting for Fraser [Nelson, Spectator Editor] to read and approve. He finally has today and suddenly he's extremely excited. I don't think he had any idea. Now he thinks they might make it a cover and says it might be the best story Spec have or will run all year! Great news, though frustrating it's taken him so long! It also means that we have to go back and double check every thing [sic] with the lawyers. We're pencilling next week. Spec doesn't really do investigative stuff so this is all a bit new to them. So If I have any further questions from Fraser, am I ok to ping them over this week?

    Really excited. I think it will be a real splash. You should be proud.

    Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email.

Soon a first draft, "Roc Nation and Wokewashing" arrived in my inbox from "Eddie Snowflake", and I quote directly from it;

    Mercifully Roc Nation apparently scratched an idea to have Prince Harry lend his support to Rashford by living on free school meals himself for a week (Bobby Sands eat your heart out).

    Roc Nation, they say, regularly dictates the issues that their clients campaign on. Apparently, Andy Murray asked the company to help him with a campaign on alternative voting systems, but it was rejected as "too dry".

    Man City midfielder Kevin De Bruyne wanted to do a pro-EU protest, but that was "too divisive". Another client was allegedly mocked in the office for proposing an anti-littering campaign. And a rising soccer star was keen to do something against the badger cull but apparently that wasn't "controversial enough".

(To clarify, the player who loves badgers was selected by googling FULHAM + ROC NATION).

I was disappointed they didn't include every campaign idea. I suggested that one footballer had gotten in touch with Roc Nation and pitched a "cooking channel" but producers told him his menu was "too English".

There were various email discussions of Roc Nation's social justice strategy; again, I quote directly from the draft;

...our Wokeyleaker tells us that Rashford vetoed the worst of Roc Nations [sic] ideas such as a suggestion to collaborate with Fortnum & Masons [sic] to allocate food stylists to poor families to teach them how to feed their kids. Because extremely poor people love getting unsolicited dietary advice from the mega-rich, as Marie Antoinette discovered when she recommended more cake.

(Obviously another thing I'd entirely made up.)

I asked friends if they thought it would ever go to print - "Of course not. It's clearly nonsense, they'll never take this seriously. The Spectator has editors and lawyers. There's no way this would get past them."

Yet still the months passed and they were wanting more.

Naturally, there were questions that kept coming back. How did Rashford benefit financially from the campaign; and exactly how much had he donated to charity, (I can only assume they wanted to do a glowing article where they praised him for his generosity).

I don't know what was in their email(s) to Rashford's team, I do however find it interesting that there were allusions to the piece having a "financial benefit" focus (the draft I saw certainly did). When asked for evidence, I would say things like;

MR donated lots but I don't know details sorry, he's quite private about his own philanthropy (annoyingly)

I had other such hard-hitting revelations such as these;

the thing with MR is he is incredibly well liked. That kind of unassuming nature of his that masks something a bit more sinister (imo) underneath.

Notwithstanding this odd fixation on Rashford, I was encouraged somewhat by other questions. Because the article wasn't about the culture wars, nor was it about Marcus Rashford. No, it was about the evils of corporate capitalism, and I think it's very nice that his work on food poverty inspired them to investigate this (I mean it only took them ~193 years).

It's Coming Home

And so we come to the Euros. I have to say I think one of the saddest things about this whole saga is how unpatriotic this Spectator contributor was, despite their magazine's jingoistic proclamations.

As Snowflake informed me;

    "I'm pushing for them to hold this until England inevitably crash out of the Euros"

As it happens, I'm sure we'd all agree that you can't really "crash out" of a final.

The England team were soon hailed as the most popular people in the country, showered with love and solidarity. Even GB News took a knee. They were more revered than David Attenborough, more respected than the Queen, and only slightly less loved than Toby from Love Island. For Marcus Rashford himself, as you are aware, there were the Withington Walls, not forgetting the MBE, and beavers naming their cubs after him.

I resigned myself to knowing that The Spectator would give up on the story - surely it would be as ill-judged as criticising the RNLI.

And yet, I received this about a week after England "inevitably crash[ed] out of the Euros" © Edward Snowflake they/them 2021.

    What a crazy week huh? The whole country loses its shit over 'racist' graffiti that turns out not to be racist at all. Shall we get this show back on the road now that it's died down a bit? I feel like this story pulls the rug out from under the feet of the left because it's not about race at all it's about corporate coopting of social justice so I'm not sure how they could complain - though they will obviously try to make it part of the culture war.[/b

Later that very evening I actually spoke to 'Edward'. Things were snowflaking and there was talk of going to print the very next day. (So soon after the Euros? But they had had this story for months!)

The Tweet

So I was giving Love Island the undivided attention it deserves, and my phone rang. That never happens! Who could this be!

"Yeah, what?' (I always answer the phone politely)

    "Um. Have you seen Twitter?" (This is my long suffering friend on the line)

    "No."

    "Can you go on Twitter."

    "No. Why? What's happened?

    "Marcus Rashford has tweeted about The Spectator doing an article on him tomorrow, about how he has financially benefited from the FSM campaign. That's not your thing trolling them is it?"

    "What???" [long pause] "Have people noticed it?"

    "Well...it has about 20,000 retweets so far so yes.. I think so."

It had indeed been noticed, and it seemed the whole world was united in supporting Rashford.***

About the same time, I saw that I had messages from "Mr Snowflake" asking to speak URGENTLY. It seemed the stakes had changed, the story (now) had to be "watertight" (presumably as their editors were being trolled on social media).

The Conference Call

So you know how it is. One minute, you're getting ready for bed, the next you're in a conference call with Fraser Nelson and Freddy Gray of The Spectator. I wondered, did Fraser and Freddy always work this late or had Rashford's tweets panicked them so much they couldn't sleep?

Apparently Fraser Nelson had googled me, and couldn't find me. Does one exist if they are not on Twitter nor LinkedIn? Is this the tree falling in the forest philosophical thought experiment for the 21st century?

I realised I was probably done for. But I had come this far. I said, after a probably long "erm"; something along the lines of, "I'm not on social media and there are hundreds of Lizzie Johnsons". I waited with baited breath to see if they would test my poor football knowledge, seriously just one question and I probably would have stumbled, it would have been that easy for them. But nothing – no, they simply wanted a brief history of my time at Roc Nation, so I invented some huff.

I could go into more detail on the call itself, how the emails I had sent were described as "proof"; how they were doing somewhat of a hatchet job of rewriting the article during the call, but I think the following exchange speaks for itself;

    "But look if you were actually a wind-up, I think we would have worked it out by now" - Fraser Nelson

    "If you are, hats off to you!" - Freddy Gray

I thought it had been fairly obvious but perhaps I expect too much. I mean I'd included references in the fake emails to various wits, whether they be Felix Dexter, Delarivier Manley or Jonathan Swift. (Plus my email avatar was a portrait of Swift's companion Vanessa, and my initials were "JS").

After the Twitter storm died down, they seemed.. quiet... so had the unthinkable happened? Had The Spectator been cruelly silenced by the woke mob who want to nationalise children?****

They continued to get in touch asking me to meet with them; in trying to convince me, they compared our situation to WikiLeaks. I invested in a burner phone, started calling "Snowflake", "H". The last I heard there were discussions relating to how they go about presenting Roc Nation with the text from an episode of BBC Comedy series The Real McCoy, and asking them for comment.

I did a few days later receive a "genuinely unifying" ("Snowflake's" words) draft with the following edit;

I think Rashford is a hero and believe he is sincere about his campaigning and charitable work. I think that his UK free school meals campaign did great good.

I'm no "journalist" but who could have predicted that a magazine encouraging people with an axe to grind, to send in anonymous emails about "woke-culture war crimes" could end badly? And who knew that the very greatest defenders of free speech in The Tepid Wars would back down so quickly after some critical tweets?

Suffice to say I live in fear for my life. Will I be cancelled for making stuff up about a national hero? Will I end up incapacitated after Darius Guppy is sent round to teach me a lesson? Have I wasted months of my life? (Well obviously yes, but at least it was mildly diverting).

Find out more about the Child Food Poverty Action Taskforce: https://endchildfoodpoverty.org/

How to help: https://endchildfoodpoverty.org/how-can-i-help

Footnotes
*I mean I have always considered The Spectator to be brave. I speak of course of The Spectator (1711) which among other things gave column inches to anti-slavery opera Inkle and Yarico. The Spectator (1828 - present day) are also brave, but perhaps not in the same way.
**I have to say I wonder at this strategy. It's not like I am a subscriber but unlike a lot of the media out there, The Speccie hopped on the subscriber business model early on and seem to have done a pretty good job of it. They thus avoided a multitude of evils namely, it taking ten hours to read anything on a news site because there are so many huge ugly advertisements for cars and other such evils of capitalism, that struggle to load, (I assume you know of whom I speak). And don't get me started on the Graun, I mean stop reminding me that I've read your articles for free to try and guilt me - it's not going to happen!
***bar Dan Hodges
****I've read and reread these comments, and I still don't understand what he means by "nationalising children". But hang on a second, what's this? The Speccie also wrote about Nationalising Children as far back as 2005! How sinister! Quick get Guido on the case!! 

Edit: Also another one for Tamas on the Scottish government doing the same covid policy as England but a week or too later and either re-branded or very slightly differently. Their approach of keeping some mask mandates is going well

Scottish Wedding Industry Alliance
@ScotWedAlliance
Confirmation from @scotgov

Masks don't need to be worn whilst dancing!
Or during drinks reception, canapés or drinks at the bar.
They do during the ceremony.
*Please note further guidance still to be published

[garbon]

I love Boris noting that Thatcher was good for the environment when she shutdown coal mines.

[Sheilbh]

I love Boris noting that Thatcher was good for the environment when she shutdown coal mines.

It's halfway true - Thatcher imported foreign coal (and natural gas). But having no domestic coal industry by the 2000s has mad it a lot easier to cut emissions.

More importantly - it's bait. I don't normally go in for the 5D chess theories. But in this case I think it is kind of deliberate (after Johnson said it he was laughing and said to the press "that's got you going hasn't it?"). I think he'll like it because it's provocative - you can see him doing a column about how Margaret Thatcher is Britain's unsung environmental heroine.

But also - the day Keir Starmer was doing a big interview with the FT ahead of his leadership "re-launch" - this will be the big story for Labour and liberal-left opinion makers/influencers. And I think that reflects an issue Labour and the left have in this country - their obsession with the past. Sometimes it makes them nostalgic or sentimental and I think sometimes it genuinely hurts their politics. I always remember Rebecca Long-Bailey talking about her disbelief a seat had gone Tory because it had been the location of one of the first strikes in the country in the 1860s from the sort of proto trade union movement

But as it is Labour will spend a few days panicking about someone who was Prime Minister 31 years ago - and once that's over they'll move onto Starmer's re-launch where he talks about the need for Labour to claim and praise the good bits of the Blair-Brown years. That will also be controversial even though all it's doing is suggested that the only Labour government in the last 40 years wasn't all bad.

In short, Labour:

[Josquius]

I don't see any truth in it at all. Though true was it likely deliberate bait to try and stir up internal shit in labour. Though a risky one in that it's the turn back the clocks to the 60s voters who are the ones more likely to vote tory.

Regardless I don't see any truth in it at all. It's fairly a given that by now most of the coal mines would have been closed. And far better for the environment to use local coal than shipping it in from abroad.

[Tamas]

I know the left will start climbing out of its hole when they can string out two sentences commenting on a present situation without naming Thatcher as the root cause of whatever issue being discussed.

[Sheilbh]

I know the left will start climbing out of its hole when they can string out two sentences commenting on a present situation without naming Thatcher as the root cause of whatever issue being discussed.

Agreed - and, as I say, it would be easier if they could try to own at least some positives from the last time they were in election (and won 3 elections in a row - back in "The Strange Death of Tory England" days ) rather than passing over that unpleasantness and reaching back to 1966 for the last good Labour government

But it's unhinged. Imagine if the SPD were spending their time getting exorcised about Kohl - or the French right were still particularly angry about Mitterrand.

I get that Labour loves its traditions and its heritage and the great fights of yore but until they can focus more on the country as it is and where it should be, instead of cos-playing, I think they'll struggle.

I don't see any truth in it at all. Though true was it likely deliberate bait to try and stir up internal shit in labour. Though a risky one in that it's the turn back the clocks to the 60s voters who are the ones more likely to vote tory.

In 2019 the cross-over age is 39. If you're over 39 you probably voted Tory, if you're under you probably voted Labour and - as you say it grows with age. But given that basically all age groups that have actual memories of Thatcher in power already vote Tory, I'm not sure it'll make that much difference.

I suspect the journalists and MPs sort of saying "we'll see how this goes down with the Red Wall" are falling into the same trap as right-wing MPs and journalists who think "people in the Red Wall" love every single bit of culture war provocation from the right.

Regardless I don't see any truth in it at all. It's fairly a given that by now most of the coal mines would have been closed. And far better for the environment to use local coal than shipping it in from abroad.

I'm not so sure. It is difficult to shut down an industry that is working - we've not seen all the coal mines closed in Germany or the US or Australia or Poland and, in fact, all of those countries use more coal power than the UK. Our last coal fired power plant will shut down in the next year or two. They are all subject to the same market forces driving a shift away from coal but it is politically really difficult to let an industry die. The fact that Thatcher did everything she could to break the miners is part of why we use so little coal energy compared to other coal producing countries - that wasn't driven by any environmental sentiment on her part it was an existential fight.

I agree on using local coal - it's why I actually support opening that new mine in Cumbria because it's to produce coal for steel manufacturing and I remember being very keen in the coalition years to nationalise British Steel or make sure that there was steel manufacturing capability in the country. I think they did some deal to keep it open. But I basically think that if I wanted steel manufacturing kept in the UK, I should probably also support the coal-mining necessary for steel manufacturing and we take the carbon hit on our carbon budget rather than outsourcing it to India or China or Australia.

[The Larch]

And far better for the environment to use local coal than shipping it in from abroad.

Not really, it depends on the quality of the local coal. Don't know what kind of coal can be extracted in the UK nowadays, but at least the case in Spain, where plants were required by law to use a certain % of local coal to fuel themselves, that local coal was of such bad quality  that it was much more polluting than bringing it from abroad (mostly Australia and Indonesia, IIRC), which produced coal of both much better quality (and thus much less polluting) and far lower price to boot.

[Sheilbh]

Not really, it depends on the quality of the local coal. Don't know what kind of coal can be extracted in the UK nowadays, but at least the case in Spain, where plants were required by law to use a certain % of local coal to fuel themselves, that local coal was of such bad quality  that it was much more polluting than bringing it from abroad (mostly Australia and Indonesia, IIRC), which produced coal of both much better quality (and thus much less polluting) and far lower price to boot.

My understanding is it's still very high quality - and comparable with Australia.

We have some lignite but it's never been mined because there's so much hard coal with a very high energy content, and quite low moisture and ash content. And there's still a lot of hard coal in the ground.

[Josquius]

I know the left will start climbing out of its hole when they can string out two sentences commenting on a present situation without naming Thatcher as the root cause of whatever issue being discussed.

To be fair she is.
This is something labour could have done well to be a lot clearer about in the past rather than just accept the tory rewriting of history.
That labour have a tendency to live in the past may well be true but they don't do this in a blaming thatcher fashion.

[The Larch]

Not really, it depends on the quality of the local coal. Don't know what kind of coal can be extracted in the UK nowadays, but at least the case in Spain, where plants were required by law to use a certain % of local coal to fuel themselves, that local coal was of such bad quality  that it was much more polluting than bringing it from abroad (mostly Australia and Indonesia, IIRC), which produced coal of both much better quality (and thus much less polluting) and far lower price to boot.

My understanding is it's still very high quality - and comparable with Australia.

We have some lignite but it's never been mined because there's so much hard coal with a very high energy content, and quite low moisture and ash content. And there's still a lot of hard coal in the ground.

Can/Could the UK's hard coal production compete in price with the Australian coal? I have no idea of its level of production, but IIRC in Europe the main producer of hard coal is Poland by quite far. Germany, on the contrary, still mines and uses plenty of lignite, which is the lower grade of coal and the more polluting one.

[Tamas]

I know the left will start climbing out of its hole when they can string out two sentences commenting on a present situation without naming Thatcher as the root cause of whatever issue being discussed.

To be fair she is.
This is something labour could have done well to be a lot clearer about in the past rather than just accept the tory rewriting of history.
That labour have a tendency to live in the past may well be true but they don't do this in a blaming thatcher fashion.

I mean, first there is yourself who absolutely cannot interpret reality other than its relationship to Thatcher (don't worry, a lot of Hungarians who hate Orban have reached this stage already). And there's the Guardian comment section where it is impossible to scroll down more than 2-3 comments without seeing "Thatcher" written down, completely regardless of the topic at hand.

Setting aside the fact whether Thatcher was a net good or not (my impression listening to you guys is that it was the correct direction and necessary steps made with way too little / zero consideration or concern given to mitigate the bad side effects), I can't possibly see how this fixation on the 80s (a growing portion of voters were not even alive then) can help address any of the current issues in people's lives.

If we went and reopened literally all the coalmines tomorrow it would improve exactly none of the existing issues of the country, and would make some of them worse. Same goes for pretty much all the heavy industry which has closed down. A lot of what happened in the UK seem to have happened in the rest of the world roughly at the same time (and behind the Iron Curtain once communism fell). It wasn't an evil woman going against the tide of history and wrecking a country bound for greatness - it was times changing and the UK's (wrong or right, up for debate) answers to that. Let's move the heck on it's been almost 40 years.