#just got a vote tory thing through the post and figured it was time for my pre-election information post

[jakeperalta]

hello people in england this is a reminder that there are local elections coming up soon on 4th may!!

I know councils don't feel very interesting or important compared to central government but they really do make so many decisions that impact our daily lives (also this election acts as a bit of a popularity test ahead of the next general election, with the tories currently predicted to lose a load of seats!)

put in your postcode here to check whether there's an election in your area

if you're not already registered to vote at your current address, you can register here until 17th april

you will need to take ID to be able to vote!! this is the first election requiring voter ID (more info here)

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

I’m listening to Andy Zaltzman’s interview on the WTF podcast, recorded in January 2021. I find Marc Maron incredibly annoying, for some reasons that are objectively justified and some that probably aren’t. I’ve sat through him twice before – once for John Oliver and once for Stewart Lee. Both times, Marc annoyed me hugely, but it was worth it to hear the guest.

He’s annoyed me in Andy Zaltzman’s podcast too. I’m a bit amazed at the number of new and inventive ways he finds to pronounce the word “Edinburgh”, managing to end it with the word “bro” a lot. “Edin-bro.” That’s one of my less objectively justified reasons to dislike him, probably, but it is pretty bad to not know how to say that properly if you’re such a significant comedian.

I’d say my least justified one is when he said to Andy, “So you grew up in London?” And I said, “No, come on, he grew up in Tumbridge Wells in Kent, a place he has described as ‘So conservative you were considered a bit of a leftie if you only voted Tory once in each election.’ Come on, Marc. How could you be so stupid as to think Andy Zaltzman grew up in London?” I then had to stop, take a step back, and remind myself that it is not at all reasonable to expect an American comedian to know where Andy Zaltzman grew up. Most British comedians do not know where Andy Zaltzman grew up. The vast majority of people in the world do not know where Andy Zaltzman grew up, it’s fine.

So I tried to check my anti-Marc Maron bias a bit, and once I did that, I realized… actually, you know what? Weirdly, Marc Maron might be the best person in the world to interview Andy Zaltzman. Andy Zaltzman tends to get evasive, to uncomfortably steer away from certain topics and it’s hard to tell when it’s genuine discomfort (which I don’t think an interviewer should press him on, I’m listening to this because I want to know where the most creative comedy I’ve ever heard comes from, but I don’t need to hear about anything he actively doesn’t want to talk about) versus just his social awkwardness making him sound vaguely uncomfortable about every topic. When I hear most people interact with Andy Zaltzman, they sort of know this, and if they get near most topics you can hear them expect to get the vaguely ironic or surreal reply. In this case, Marc Maron’s drawback as an interview who knows fuck all about his interviewee works in his favour. He asks Andy Zaltzman questions and expects to get an answer the way you would from a normal person, and when he doesn’t, he just repeats it. It’s kind of cool.

Marc Maron and Andy Zaltzman are wildly different comedians in just about every way, but they do have one weirdly specific thing in common, which is a… complicated relationship with The Daily Show. That highlights how different they are – Marc Maron spent years very publicly being a huge asshole about Jon Stewart, due to jealousy of Stewart’s success. And then sort of offered to apologize but only if he can do it for publicity on his podcast – seriously, fuck that guy (I’d say this is one of my more justified reasons to dislike Marc Maron). While Andy Zaltzman spent the first few years on The Bugle with a running joke where after John Oliver would tell one of his showbiz anecdotes about whatever celebrity he’d met through his Daily Show job that week, Andy would add that he had quite a good [insert different type of lunch meat each time] sandwich that week so they’ve all got stuff going on. He kept that up for so long that when I was relatively early in my Bugle listening, I made a bunch of posts on here saying I can’t figure out what’s going on with Andy Zaltzman, he seems to genuinely be totally unbothered by the commercial success discrepancy. When I got a hundred or so episodes into I declared that I’d figured out the answer, and it’s that Andy Zaltzman is just totally unimpressed by anything in the world that isn’t a bad pun or a cricket stat. He truly, deep down, does not want to meet Hugh Jackman. Episode 90 was the one in which he absolutely roasted John Oliver for committing the embarrassing transgression of winning an Emmy, and it didn’t sound like jealousy, it sounded like he understood awards ceremonies to be the stupidest thing in the world.

Cracks in that did start to show eventually, mainly when Johnny Showbiz’s Daily Show career became less about meeting Hugh Jackman and more about propelling him to get his own TV show and leave the rest of his career behind. But they were only ever the tiniest of cracks. He did his Comedian’s Comedian episode in 2014, just as this was starting to happen, and Stuart Goldsmith had to push him pretty hard, from a few different angles, to get the words “Yes, maybe at certain times and in some ways I have been a bit jealous” out of him, which felt like a massively out-of-character thing to say. And once he actually left, there may have been a short while of just the tiniest traces of bitterness in the way he used the once-purely-affectionate nickname Johnny Showbiz, and one time he took a moment out of one Bugle episode to say congratulations are owed to his former colleague on winning two Emmys in one night “Presumably for Most Elongated Departure From a Podcast and Least Enthusiasm For Physical Contact on a Football Pitch,” and he might have once shouted “Fuck you Percy Primetime, everyone in this room has heard of me!” upon finding three members of his stand-up audience who hadn’t heard of John Oliver. You know, little cracks. There was that one time when a reviewer called him a “left-behind sidekick" and he had what was, by his normally unflappable standards, a small breakdown, referencing that review with increasing frustration for several weeks’ worth of episodes, and recording an interview with himself about how he doesn’t want to be famous anyway and he loves writing in his shed.

So really, when you look at all that, Marc Maron might be the right guy to interview Andy Zaltzman. Both had reason to be bitter toward The Daily Show, one expressed this loudly and publicly for ages, while the other made like one slightly passive-aggressive comment on a podcast an average of every 1.5 years. One has built his comedy brand on relentlessly oversharing every single emotion he has for money, another does almost entirely political and sometimes vaguely surreal comedy, and sounds notably uncomfortable if he’d expected to get personal about anything. This is all relevant context for this exchange:

Andy Zaltzman: [John Oliver and I] met doing the live stand-up circuit, and he did little sketches in my first Edinburgh show, I did some stuff in his first Edinburgh show the following year, in 2002. We toured on the student union circuit – in my generation of British comedians there was quite a thriving student union circuit where you could go and experiment, and it didn’t matter so much if you…

Marc Maron: But that was better than clubs, right?

Andy Zaltzman: It was better than clubs, partly because, generally you were booked in to do a whole tour, so it wasn’t like you had to succeed at every gig to get called back. So we got to know each other pretty well then, we did some radio series together, then when John got the Daily Show job and left me doing an Edinburgh show alone instead of a two-hander in front of about twenty-five people a night as he went to the biggest comedy show in the world… um…

Marc Maron: And how did that go for you? How did you take that?

Andy Zaltzman: Well, I’ll be honest, it was a bit tricky at the time. [Marc Maron cackles in the background, like a man who was not expecting to be able to get a guest to talk shit about Jon Stewart-era Daily Show on this day, and is pleased it’s gone in this direction] It was about a month before Edinburgh started, and so… it would be an exaggeration to say I had to rewrite the show, because we hadn’t entirely got round to writing it at that point…

Marc Maron [audibly sensing blood in the water]: That must have been a horrible conversation.

Andy Zaltzman: Well, not really, because it was – you know – clearly a pretty big opportunity, so…

Marc Maron: No, yeah, I know. But still, you had to suck it up.

Andy Zaltzman: Uh, I guess so. And we’d also had two BBC radio series canceled round about the same time, and I found out my wife was pregnant, so it was a month of considerable upheaval… uh, for me.

Marc Maron sounded like he was having so much fun in that exchange. In John Oliver’s episode, he pushed John Oliver to talk shit about Jon Stewart and John Oliver refused to do it, straight-up shut down that line of questioning and said he knows how Marc feels about Jon but he doesn’t have a single bad word to say about Jon Stewart. Marc kept trying for a bit in a way that made things incredibly, painfully awkward, and he was clearly disappointed when he couldn’t get that, you could see he’d been looking forward to having on the Daily Show guy so he could find an outlet for his grudge against Jon Stewart. There’s such a contrast to how he sounds at this point in Andy Zaltzman’s interview, so excited to get the tiniest bit of commiseration about the shared experience of getting left behind by The Daily Show. To the point where weirdly, I may have started to sympathize with Marc Maron a tiny bit. And you can tell that Andy Zaltzman has no idea he’s been put in the middle of any of this, and is just trying to stumble through answers to the questions.

Although he may have had some idea, because he’s mentioned at other times that he had to rewrite stuff for their 2006 joint Edinburgh show once it became a solo show instead, which makes me think by saying they hadn’t written it before John left, he was downplaying how much effect that event had to avoid giving more bait to a shark that sensed blood in the water.

They then discuss whether Andy Zaltzman should do a show about having a baby, or a breakup show, the way some people win awards for doing these days, but the drawback is that he married young and it’s worked out ever since. I found that conversation hilarious, just because it’s funny to imagine Andy Zaltzman doing a show like that. It would be amusing if he did just one sometime, and didn’t explain it. An entire show about parenthood with absolutely nothing surreal, just true stories about the wacky adventures of raising teenagers, and then go right back to his usual stuff.

They also discuss Judaism, and I suppose that’s another thing they sort of have in common, both being Jewish. Again I find myself sympathizing with Marc Maron a bit, because you can hear that he’s so interested in learning what it’s like to be Jewish in Britain, and Andy Zaltzman keeps disappointing him. Marc Maron would have more luck getting John Oliver to talk shit about Jon Stewart than getting Andy Zaltzman to give a detailed an accurate account of Jewish communities in Britain. Andy Zaltzman, whose most personal stand-up material is probably the stuff about how much loves bacon and doesn’t even know when the Jewish holidays are despite the religion into which he was born.

Marc Maron then asks what the difference is between Oxford and Cambridge, after Andy mentions that he went to the former and John Oliver went to the latter. Which I thought was quite a funny question, even if unintentionally so. Weirdly, I am warming to Marc Maron more and more.

He asks Andy in about eight different ways for some basic biographical details about how Andy Zaltzman got into comedy during/just after his days at Oxford, and Andy Zaltzman is relentlessly more interested in explaining how ancient Greek plays can be applied to modern stand-up, and at this point the interview becomes a comedy of wildly mismatched personalities. He eventually gets the story out of Andy that he did one comedy gig that went very badly and then spent a year sub-editing articles, before getting back on the comedy circuit.

Marc Maron: And who was around? Who were the guys that you started with, that are still around?

Me: Oh! I can answer that one, actually, Marc. Have you ever heard of a drink called chocolate milk?

Andy Zaltzman: Well, John was starting round about the same time. Um, Russell Howard was starting ‘round then. Jimmy Carr, people who’d been very successful around then. Daniel Kitson was sort of the… the big… you know, the most successful comedian of my generation… creatively, him, he was, I think, you know, everyone of my generation, on the circuit, sort of looked up to. He was, you know, started doing stuff…

Marc Maron: Yeah, yeah, I heard about Kitson for years, and I think I saw, I saw one big show of his in London. I know he does – you know, he’s a, uh, unique person. Uh, doesn’t do the podcast, or talk, or, you know, function, necessarily, in a sociable way… but I’ve met him a few times, and I know that he’s revered.

Me: Aaaannnd there goes my sympathizing with Marc Maron. It was building up for a bit, gone now. Go fuck yourself, Maron.

I transcribed Andy’s answer word for word, including the stuttering and filler words, to try to get across just how much it sounds like having this conversation is akin to water torture for him. And how getting a straight answer out of him seems a bit like pulling teeth for Marc Maron. These two could have a sitocm together based on comically contrasting personalities, the oversharing American and the reserved Brit.

Anyway, that’s about halfway through the interview, at which point I decided to stop and write this down. They covered a bunch of other stuff too, about Andy Zaltzman’s familial, educational, and comedy backgrounds. Marc Maron got more out of him than most people do, just by not seeming bothered by the discomfort he created, which may be a good thing in some cases and a bad thing in other cases. Marc Maron talked a lot of shit about the Edinburgh Fringe Festvial, and Andy Zaltzman defended it.

This has gotten pretty long so I think I’ll post it now, even though there are forty-ish minutes left. I am quite enjoying this. Will get into the 2022 Bugle after this, and then presumably go back to having stuff to say about the actual comedy, I’ll admit that this entire post, and this entire interview, are pretty much only about comedian gossip. But it happens to be the exact side of comedian gossip I’m interested in. Marc Maron is clearly the man to go to if you want some gossip.

[eliotquillon]

mark walden and politics in h.i.v.e

as you probably all know by now (thanks to the j.k rowling fiasco), art and politics are inherently linked; whether it’s intentional or not, it’s difficult to extricate an author’s beliefs from the way they manifist in literature. and with that in mind, let’s talk about politics in h.i.v.e.

h.i.v.e is a series that has never exactly shied away from criticising the politics of the year each book was published in, and you can probably see this best in the character of matt ronson, who is the most obvious stand in for mitt romney that i’ve ever seen in my entire life. romney was running against obama in the 2012 election, and, coincidentally enough, matt ronson appears in deadlock, which was published in 2013 (and almost certainly written during 2012). in case you’ve repressed the events of deadlock (which i wouldn’t blame you for lmao), ronson’s a senior member of the disciples - he’s actually head of an entire cell - and is running for president in order to secure the disciples’ control over the united states. it’s not exactly subtle imagery. it’s definitely the boldest walden gets in terms of critiquing the state of late 00s-early 2010s politics, and is also the example that i think is easiest to pick up on, because of how similar ronson and romney’s names are, and how in-your-face the whole scene is. i mean, otto leaves ronson to die in a plane pre-programmed to crash in the middle of the ocean because when raven tells him that a bullet would’ve been quicker, his response is, quote, “too quick.” for further proof, if you check walden’s twitter, he’s pretty positive towards obama on the whole, which i imagine is why he decided to kill off obama’s presidential challenger.

but that’s not the first time politics gets infused in h.i.v.e. the first time - the one that actually serves as the catalyst for, well, everything - is otto deposing the prime minister by making him moon the nation on live television. book 1 was published in 2006; this was when tony blair was prime minister in the uk. if you’re unfamiliar with uk politics, blair is pretty harshly criticised on both sides of the political spectrum for his role in the iraq war/the 2008 financial crash (although he resigned and appointed gordon brown as his successor in 2007), and the fact that he created ‘new labour’, a movement which pushed the predominantly working class, leftist labour party further towards the ‘moderate centre’ in an attempt to capture more of the middle class vote as opposed to labour’s traditional post-industrial ‘northern heartlands’. the prime minister that otto deposes is blair, or at least a stand in for him; i’ll give proof below.

the important thing is that otto decides to get rid of the prime minister because st. sebastian’s is closing down, and st. sebastian’s is closing down because of the prime minister’s childcare reforms that result in, quote, “the restructuring of local childcare provision.” whether or not st. sebastian being closed would’ve been an overal net positive or not is debatable (otto mentions that the building was starting to become “genuinely unsafe”), but if you don’t know much about blair, he was BIG on restructuring, especially in london, where st sebastian’s is located, and something in particular that blair was fond of was giving more powers to local councils (essentially, shifting the uk to more of a federal system than a centralised one). you’ve probably already guessed, but yep, the letter that announces st. sebastian’s is closing comes from the local council. it’s also mentioned that the childcare reforms have “the prime minister’s personal backing”, and, yep, childcare budgets and early years spending increased exponentially under blair (he even renamed the department of education to the department of children, schools, and families, which was promptly renamed AGAIN once labour left office, but that’s a rant for another day). there’s also the fact that otto goes to brighton for the prime minister’s party conference - this is where the labour party conference is held, whereas the conservative party conference alternates between birmingham and manchester. finally, in zero hour (published in 2010) it’s mentioned that the prime minister resigned and that his party lost in the next general election - this is exactly what happened to blair and new labour after the financial crash. of course, this evidence is very circumstantial, but i don’t think that this is a coincidence, and, anyway, i struggle to see how walden could’ve been more explicit in implying that this is blair without facing parental backlash.

now onto the political commentary; i’ve already mentioned how everyone hates blair, and walden is no exception. the statement that otto makes the prime minister is absolutely damning. it’s too long for me to copy and paste the entire thing (i say, when this post is going to be ridiculously long anyway), but here are some highlights: “we hold you and your families in nothing but the deepest contempt”, “i don’t think that we get enough credit for having to put up with your constant whining”, “half of you can barely read or write, and the way the education system’s going, that’s not going to change any time soon”, “we don’t care” “all we care about is power and money”, “shut your mouths and cut the moaning, because we don’t give a monkey’s.” i think it’s pretty safe to say that this is not exactly positive. personally, i think that the “moaning” and “whining” walden refers to here is a reference to the anti-war protests about the us/uk invasion of iraq, and there were complaints about the scrapping of grammar schools/“dumbing down” of the GCSE qualifications (regardless of whether or not that was intentional) across the board for years both before and after blair got into power. but whichever way you look at it, this is not a glowing representation of blair. and if you look on walden’s twitter (again), he tends to retweet a lot from michael rosen and owen jones, both prominent labour members who are very staunchly anti blair and anti ‘new labour’.

also, while searching walden’s twitter for blair references, i also came across this 2019 tweet:

where, as you can see, he shares an anecdote about how his old house used to be next to an army range and that his neighbour told him that military helicopters were often “flown by a 21 year old with a hangover”. and, like, i’m not saying that that’s the inspiration for 13 year old laura being able to hack a military base so she could spy on her classmates, but i’m totally saying that.

anyway, there’s one more political figure i want to cover here, and that’s duncan cavendish, aka the prime minister in zero hour. anyway: duncan cavendish is former conservative prime minister david cameron (notice the identical initials). i did actually ask walden about this on twitter, and he said he ‘couldn’t possibly comment’, which imo most likely means that he’s unable to confirm because of contractual reasons. but anyway: zero hour was published in 2010, the year of the election which put the conservatives (for clarity’s sake, i’m going to be referring to them as tories for the rest of this post) back into power for the first time in 13 years (albeit in a coalition with the centrist libdem party), meaning that it was written in 2009 when cameron was party leader, and after the 2008 crash. i don’t think walden knew for sure that cameron would come to power (after all, in zero hour it’s stated that cavendish’s party won by a landslide, whereas the actual 2010 election resulted in ‘hung parliament’), but it wasn’t exactly a hard guess to make that labour would lose after the events of 2007/8 and their record in iraq.

something that particularly sticks out to me is cavendish thanking nero for switching him from the polfi stream to the alpha stream - in real life, cameron has an a level in economics, and studied philosophy, politics, and economics at oxford and his father is also a stockbroker, all aspects which certainly scream polfi to me. personally, i think this was a dig at cameron’s fairly elitist background, and the fact that he’s historically been seen as an opportunist rather than a real leader. also, cameron was once approached in the former soviet union by two men he suspected were KGB agents trying to recruit him, and i’m not saying that walden used this connection when linking cavendish to pietor furan and the disciples, but....yeah. there’s also the fact that nero references cavendish’s academic record of going to an elite boys’ school being fudged, and, yeah, cameron attended eton (he also got suspended for smoking cannabis, which is just. a lot to think about for a man who helped push through legislation that further penalised cannabis users). again, on twitter walden has been extremely outspoken against the tories in general, specifically about brexit, the referendum for which occurred under cameron’s government. also walden kind of predicted the future: in zero hour, cavendish is blackmailed by nero into resigning. in real life, cameron resigned the whip (left both his post and the tory party as an MP) in 2016 after the uk voted to leave the eu. obviously that’s not proof of anything but it just makes me laugh.

those are the specific figures - now let’s talk more about walden’s general ideologies. he’s very anti-gun on twitter, and this obviously links to wing and his refusal to wield guns/shoot people; wing’s arguably the most staunchly moral character in the series, which i don’t think is a coincidence. walden bashed mass surveillance by having otto abhor (and later destroy) echelon; echelon is actually a real international government project that was originally designed for military surveillance but later branched out into greater mass surveillance (also, fun fact! i only live about an hour’s drive from an echelon radome base, so i hope my mi5 agent is enjoying this post). we see walden criticise mass surveillance again with the existence of the artemis project (and also the disciples’ use of facial recognition software), and while i have no idea whether or not that’s real, i think everyone knows that there are multiple international coalitions devoted to gathering and sharing data on world citizens (google the nine eyes partnership if you want to give yourself a bit of a crisis). walden has reposted a picture that says ‘make orwell fiction again’ on twitter, so it’s pretty clear where he stands on that. in general, walden is left wing, and that shows in his books - while i’ve corroborated all of my assumptions here with evidence i found on walden’s twitter, i came to most of these conclusions on my own just from reading the source material.

and this is why i’m only 90% joking when i talk about walden lagging behind on book 9 because there’s so many different things he needs to satirize. the global stage has changed dramatically since deadlock’s publication, and if walden’s passionate about critiquing those in power, he’s got a lot of content to choose from - trump, obviously, but also boris johnson and theresa may over on this side of the pond (and he really, really hates johnson). h.i.v.e as a story is inherently political, and not just because of the more obvious “morally grey villains” trope. walden uses his fictional world to critique the real-life authority figures in control, and does so while keeping it subtle enough so as to not tip off most casual readers. overall, it’s pretty impressive.

[mysticpenguincreation]

MTV The Challenge 34, ep. 5 recap

I wanted to post many little snippets as usual, but I watched with a friend and couldn’t pause the ep.

Now I’m too tired to parse this one huge note I made, so I’m gonna recap the highlights of this ep in points.

1. ‘Don’t play Paulie’s game, play your own game Josh’ (c) Johnny Bananas. Kind of hypocritical to say that, because by saying that you’re essentially manipulating him into playing YOUR game. It’s nothing new because this is how this game IS PLAYED. In fact it is A GAME, so this tactic is, in fact, is a GOOD game tactic. However, if Josh doesn’t understand he’s being played, he’s got no brainsells whatsoever.

2. This is basically a verbal tug-of-war between Johnny/Paulie and Josh is like a rope between them. It’s hilarious, but at the same time I feel so bad for the poor boy, he looks like he’s gonna explode 😬😬😬

3. I remember how in the very beginning when Bananas tried to recruit Zach, the latter literally screamed how he wants to stay out of huge scandals and play his own game. (Considering his constant shif talk behind ppls’ backs, he’s not doing a very good job). He was recruited anyway to be Bananas’ cannon fodder. Supposedly, Zach is not in Bananas’ alliance now after his shady business with Wes last season? So, he’s basically now on his own, it’s what he wanted since the very beginning. But at the end of the day, when it comes to voting and plotting, he is STILL one of Bananas’ votes. I really wanna bet how long Zach will last until he becomes Johnny’s bitch again.

4. Zach belittling Ninja. Zach belittling a woman. What’s fucking new. Sometimes I imagine picking up a very dirty sock and shoving it down his throat until he chokes 🙄

5. Let’s again ‘assume’ that someone should be THE BEST at certain things, or better AT EVERYTHING, and drag them through the mud for that. A.k.a. everyone against TURBO OF ALL PEOPLE. The literal beast and cinnamon roll all in one package. He is not SUPPOSED to be a superhuman and be perfect at EVERYTHING. It’s funny to see how mediocre people (read between the lines: Zach) are degrading him for doing THIS ONE THING decently, but not excellent. Or Tori screaming at Turbo, like you’re good, but not that good, so shut the fuck up. Or Jordan. I genuinely like Jordan most of the time, but we all KNOW that you are in Top 3 best swimmers on the Challenge and this man you’re making jokes about is swimming long distance for the first time in his life. As any physical activity it takes TRAINING to be the best at something. Don’t tell me you were miraculously granted the gift of swimming like a dolphin the first time your body touched the water. It doesn’t happen like that. So, please, kindly. Shut it.

6. Bear gloating about ‘smoking’ Leroy in swimming Challenge is honestly is one of the most pathetic things I’ve ever seen. Like, Leroy several times pointed out that he is not a good swimmer. In fact, on the first few Challenges he didn’t even know HOW to swim and even made jokes about learning swimming by watching videos on YouTube. It’s not like Leroy of all people would be so hard to beat in a Challenge that involves mostly moving through water. If anything, I would like to point out how fucking PROUD I am of Leroy actually keeping up with Bear! The man is doing good, he really does care and prepares himself for these things.

7. Is it a shock? I honestly would have been surprised if Jordan hadn’t won. As I already said, he’s up in the Top 3 swimmers, after all.

8. I wish Wes was still around SO BAD. Both in general, AND for this Challenge. I LIVE for Wes + water challenges. It’s also so hot how he almost never wears lifesaving jacket in those. Ugh, love this man. Miss him so much💔 At least, we’ve been blessed with one water Challenge + Wes this season 🙏🏻

9. Wtf? I thought it was obvious UK won?!?!?!?! How come USA are still on top after fucking up so greatly?

10. Cara’s ex-friends: ‘Paulie is bad and toxic for you. You’re not you around him. He maipulates you. You’ve changed for worst’.

Paulie’s friends: ‘Cara is bad and toxic for you. You’re not you around her. She maipulates you. You’ve changed for worst’.

Me: ...Seems like match made in Heaven to me. They really deserve each other, don’t they?🙄🤦🏼‍♀️

11. Another precious thing we lost to Paulie: Cara/Bananas friendship. They were doing so well!!!😭😭😭

12. Rogan and Theo comparing dicks are frustrating and boring.

13. Cara silently making that face during other team’s discussion —-> 😏 .....ugh😣

14. Seems like Kyle... got brains? Who knew.

15. Don’t see lots of Kaileygh this season 😑🤔

16. I’m so fucking tired of people voting their own teammates in🙄😐😠

17. I am genuinely surprised that Jordan believed Paulie and didn’t see his betrayal coming. Paulie’s always been Cara’s puppy, going after people that are ‘against her’. Jordan definitely should have figured it out 🙄

18. Theo is too fucking huge for this cage. Is he even able to untangle his limbs?

19. Laurel looses to a technicality. Bananas looses to a technicality. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not upset about them leaving. This trope is just getting old.

20. Nany supporting Bananas is cute ❤️ No matter what.

21. TJ seriously helped Bananas? Is he even allowed to do this?

22. I would have wanted Johnny to stay just to see him switch teams.

23. Bananas wanted to win for Leroy? Don’t make me laugh. You’re trying to win for MONEY. They all are. Let’s at least be honest about that. Also it is quite insulting to Leroy. Bananas literally implied that without him Leroy won’t make it to the final. Not that it’s completely untrue, but Leroy’s always been a good competitor, I just think he doesn’t put serious effort into the game, that’s all.

P. S. FINALLY, I want Paulie to lose SO BAD 😫😫😫

P. P. S. I really am not interested in watching after Wes gone, but I do it anyway out of habit.

[sparky373]

My Brexit Post

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/241584 Over 5 million signatures. Hopefully you've signed it already. If you haven't, hopefully this post will help persuade you.

I've debated with people and shared a lot of posts about brexit but I figured I should actually explain my views.

I believe very strongly that we are better off in the EU than not. I honestly think the best course of action would be to ask the EU for an extension of a long enough time to carry out a Peoples Vote that would hopefully come out with remain as the dominant choice.

The position we are in now is precarious to say the least. We are on the cliff edge of dropping out of the EU without a deal. Some may say that's not a bad thing. I disagree. So let’s go through this point by point:

Trade Pretty much any expert who's looked at it says leaving the EU already has and will cause economic damage. Leaving without a deal would be far worse. Just by leaving we are weakening our position in the world. We will no longer be part of a 600 million strong trading block.

For those who don't understand why this is bad think about Unions. Before they existed labour conditions and pay were much worse than now. Unions prove that banding together in collective bargaining is much more effective that trying to strike deals on your own. The EU together is able to strike much more beneficial deals than individual countries on their own. Following that logic any deal we strike post brexit will not be as good as we had in the EU. Going into negotiations with larger economies like China and the US we will be at a BIG disadvantage and will get far less favourable terms than we currently enjoy.

May's current deal has us leaving the customs union and the single market. Currently we enjoy frictionless, tariff free trade with EU countries. And an exit that takes us out of those adds expensive barriers to trading with our largest import/export partner. Fees that businesses themselves will have to pay. (Hence why a lot of small & Medium businesses are worried about this)

Movement Given there are millions of british people living abroad in the EU. Free movement is something that has benefited UK citizens. Post brexit their future is uncertain.

Ever wanted to retire to Spain or France? We leave the EU and it gets much harder. Seen a job in the EU or been offered one? Prepare to have to go through visa processes that we don't have to at the minute. Want to visit non-EU countries? All our travel agreements are as an EU country so those will have to be redone.

But it works both ways. The UK relies on EU citizens coming over here to work. The NHS? All those jobs you don't want to do or think beneath you? Seasonal workers? propped up by EU citizens. It will be harder and there will be less incentive for them to come over post brexit even ignoring the seemingly rising xenophobia.

Laws People say we don't have control of our laws. We do for the vast majority of things. Parliament forcing amendments through so May had to get approval for the deal rather than negotiating in secret and forcing through something no one agreed with? Our government did that with their sovereignty. Some stuff does come from the EU. For example the EU working hours directive that stops companies making us work over 48 hours a week without our explicit consent. Tell me with a straight face a tory government would have implemented that without being forced to. And even the stuff that comes from the EU we have a say in. We are an EU member. That means we get a seat at the table and we get to vote on and if necessary veto EU legislation Those MEPs we send over. That’s their job. If they’re not doing it (*cough* Farage) it's not the EUs responsibility. It's ours. we vote those people out and replace them with people who will do their job just like with the UK parliament.

Leaving the EU means we'd still have to follow their regulations when trading with them. If we leave but stay in the single market or customs union we still have to follow their regulations. There's just one difference: We'd no longer have a say in making those laws!

What’s the phrase? Oh yh: You've got to be in it to win it.

When Washington D.C. is asking for statehood and complaining about taxation without representation, why are we actively trying to put ourselves in that position?

People seem convinced we'll leave and be able to strike the best possible deal with the EU. The best possible deal? We've already got it. Norway model? Switzerland? Turkey? Canada? WTO? All worse than what we currently enjoy.

Am I saying the EU is this perfect utopia? No Do I think the best option is to stay in the EU, have a say, and change it for the better from within? Hell yes.

More and more people are realising that leaving is not the right thing to do. So why are we still on a course to crash out with no deal?

The referendum There are many reasons Leave took the referendum: Some people have legitimate concerns, some people are racist, others voted not for brexit but as a protest, others because of all the fearmongering and lies. The argument that the country voted for our current situation is patently false. The referendum asked leave or remain (a stupidly simple question for such a complex issue)

It did not ask do you want to leave without a deal? It did not ask do you want to leave regardless of what the deal is?

Some people have legitimate concerns about the EU, fair enough but is it not better to stay and try to fix those issues than leave and cause uncertainty and major economic harm.

Some people, by their own admission on camera, voted leave not because they wanted to leave the EU, but as a protest against the government. They did not vote for Mays deal. They did not vote for no deal.

Some people voted leave because they believed the lies peddled by the leave campaign and the media. Many, when the falsehoods were exposed, said they would have voted differently. They do not want Mays deal. They do not want no deal.

David Cameron did not promise the referendum because he wanted people to have a choice about EU membership. He promised it because he feared losing seats to UKIP. The Tories played party politics with huge generational changes, thinking Leave wouldn’t possibly win, and they lost.

The media splashed the lies all over their pages not because they thought them true but because the wanted to sell papers and rich people didn’t want to be subject to upcoming EU legislation attacking tax havens.

All the big names and CEOs that told you Leaving was the best choice? The vast majority of them are moving overseas to avoid the harm. Funny that.

Let’s take a look at the lies: £350 million a week for the nhs? Lie we can put the money we currently pay into the EU to our own people? So far what’s being promised is less than now. e.g. stronger towns fund. Lie No one’s talking about leaving the single market or the customs union? Lie Brexit will be a breeze with no downsides? Lie We'll be better off on our own? So far it looks to be a lie Britain will still be open for business? Even before we leave we are already losing jobs as companies and organisations move to other EU countries so they can maintain access to that market rather than stay here.

The leave campaigns were fined for their lies A court declared that if the referendum hadn't been advisory it would have been struck down because of the lies So why are we still ploughing ahead?

Demographics If you look at the distribution of votes in the referendum it was overwhelmingly the case that older voters voted to leave while younger people voted to remain. The people that would have to live the longest with the result wanted to stay. While the people who wouldn't have to deal with it for long wanted to leave. If you look at eligible voters a fair amount of the older people have died since the referendum, meanwhile there are a lot of people who were too young to vote then that are now eligible. These are people who are having brexit thrust upon them without having had a say. The demographics have shifted; The vast majority of polls now show that remain would win if the people were asked again. You can understand why younger people think the older generation fucked us over.

ReMOANers There's a common brexiteer argument that remainers are to blame for the current situation. 'They didn’t accept the result and get behind it', 'They're sabotaging brexit'

To them I say: Shut Up

In any other situation if you see someone putting themselves on a course that will harm people you try to stop it. Even if they don't see it as harm. It would be antithetical of me to just let someone walk off a cliff, and people would judge me if I did. So why is this any different?

Ireland The Good Friday Agreement is the treaty that has kept peace in Ireland and stopped 'The Troubles'. The UK government is legally required to uphold it. No-one wants to see it fail. But that's what brexit will cause. Part of the agreement states that there must be regulatory alignment and no hard border. It is literally impossible to leave the EU fully and honour that.

Leave the EU completely, including the customs union and single market? Hard border, regulatory differences. Agreement broken

Have a border in the Irish sea? Divides Great Britain and Northern Ireland potentially causing a breakup of the UK which no one wants and causes a whole heap of issues (after all Scotland voted remain in their independence referendum after being promised by David Cameron that we'd stay in the EU)

Stay in the single market and Customs Unions? People will complain we didn’t leave fully, we still have to follow laws & regs but have no say in them

Stay in the EU? Agreement intact, best possible deal.

There's a reason why Ireland and the backstop have been and continue to be such a difficult topic. Because it is next to impossible to reconcile leaving the EU and keeping the Good Friday Agreement intact.

Membership fees People cite the fees we pay, as reason for leaving. They think we pay in more than they pay back. And yet those same people don’t say the same about spotify, netflix, internet, TV,... Because people recognise that there are more benefits to a membership than how much investment you get. The access to trade partners, the say in law-making. The economic and political benefits we get from being in the EU are massive and if anything are more than worth the fees we pay.

Theresa May Right now Theresa May is being a gigantic hypocrite. The (non-binding advisory) referendum? once in a lifetime, the people have spoken, brexit is the will of the people and must be carried out no matter what

Her defeated deal? Brought back to parliament as many times as she can get away with until MPs vote her way. Holding the country hostage against the cliff edge of no deal. Spewing hate that is getting MPs who don't agree with her assaulted in the streets

It is not undemocratic to ask people if they've changed their mind, especially when circumstances have changed. If anything it is supremely democratic.

The people voted to leave? They voted based on lies. They did not vote for Mays deal, they did not vote for no deal so how is it wrong to go back to the country and ask if they're ok with what has been negotiated or if they want to do something else?

In fact given people had so many different views of what brexit would be, none of the options for leaving commanded a majority.

The people want you to get on with brexit? Data says they don't.

If nothing else revoking Article 50 gives us time to work things out without the cloud of uncertainty and damage hanging over us. In a situation such as this is it not better to stay in a position of safety and keep the status quo, rather than jumping off a cliff and hoping there's a land of mattresses at the bottom?

Brexit was never going to be a good thing, the people telling you it would be lied to you. It's not a bad thing to admit you were wrong or that you fell for their fantasy. What is bad is refusing to admit when you're wrong to the detriment of yourself and everyone else .

The deal that we have at the moment ceases to exist if we leave. If we get out and then decide we made a mistake and want back in, then that deal no longer exists. We go back in as a normal member. No rebate, no opt-outs, none of the extras that we have now.

Hopefully these arguments will have helped you realise that we're better off in the EU and we should revoke Article 50

If not, then I don't know what to say and I doubt anything will change your mind.

Sometimes when something goes wrong in a plane, a fighter pilot refuses to eject thinking they can fix the issue. Right until they hit the ground. Don't be that pilot.

For those of you that have, I'll link to the petition again. Given Theresa May's stubborn refusal to even entertain the idea of a People's Vote, this may be our only chance at saving the country we all love.

For those who don't want to leave but don't think signing will do anything, even if it doesn't work at least you can look yourself in the eye and say you didn't stand idly by while the country went to shit.

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/241584

[pardontheglueman]

Yanis Varoufakis: Adults in the Room

Jeremy Corbyn’s radical transformation of a neo-liberal Labour Party, which had hit rock bottom when endorsing the Cameron government’s 2015 Welfare Reform Bill into a progressive, re-energised anti-austerity movement, has allowed Labour to speak about the mass slaughter of council tenants in the Grenfell Tower fire, a tragedy brought about by a savage Conservative cost-cutting agenda, with something approaching moral clarity. David Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham who lost a close friend in the fire, spoke for many when he declared ‘If burning in your own home isn’t political, I don’t know what is. It’s a scandal and a crime. Behind all of this, is money and profit. When you go down to West London and look at that building, it’s like looking at a vision of hell. It’s a vision of a burnt out shell and that burnt out shell is where we have got to in terms of austerity in this country’.

It will come as no surprise to the Tory architects of austerity that poor people end up dying as a direct result of their flagship policy. A report into the Department of Work and Pensions’ policy of sanctioning claimants in Salford carried out by The Salford Partnership concluded that ‘strict benefit conditionality, the threat and use of benefit sanctions, causes damage to the wellbeing of vulnerable claimants and can lead to hunger, debt, destitution, self-harm, and suicide’. The DWP response, aided by a compliant media, was to suppress 49 secret reports into claimant deaths for as long as possible (it took more than two years to obtain the reports under the Freedom of Information Act). Furthermore, the DWP’s notorious, target-driven fitness for work tests, administered by private contractors ATOS have regularly declared terminally ill people fit and able to work. A report, in July 2012, entitled Incapacity Benefits: Deaths of Recipients revealed that between 2010 and 2011 a shocking 10,600 people had died while undergoing the DWP assessment process.

The mass panic sweeping over a Tory party which, until now, has been decidedly relaxed about just how many poor people their economic and social policies are killing, is simply because the massacre of men, women, and children at Grenfell Tower has happened right in front of the T.V cameras. This time there are witnesses and plenty of them! We’ve all seen the horror with our own eyes. The Tories won’t be able to commission a report into Grenfell and then steadfastly refuse to release it; no longer will Boris Johnson be able to tell a Labour opponent who dared to question his plans for fire service cuts in London to “get stuffed”; no longer will the Daily Mail be able to wheel out dismal lackeys like Toby Young to pour scorn all over anyone demanding an end to grotesque levels of inequality in Britain. His puerile, poisonous piece attacking Ken Loach's I, Daniel Blake was a new low for our rabid tabloid press.

The great Tory austerity swindle is over; Grenfell Tower is a tipping point, the neo-liberal free-for-all that began under Margaret Thatcher and continued unabated through the Tony Blair / Gordon Brown years, incredibly gaining momentum after the de-regulated banks crashed the world economy in an orgy of greed and criminality is surely over now. Nearly forty years on from the rise to power of Thatcher, a reborn labour movement stands on the verge of power, armed with a moral and political mandate to rebuild the welfare state, redistribute wealth in favour of working people and to smash the phony policy of austerity once and for all!  

Set against this turbulent background, Yanis Varoufakis’ Adults in the Room, (a fascinating fly-on-the-wall account of how the Syriza Government of 2015 led the left’s fight against a European Union intent on enforcing a psychotic programme of perpetual austerity), proves to be a timely and instructive read. Varoufakis was teaching economics at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas when Prime Minister in waiting Alexis Tsipras offered him the high profile post of Finance Minister in the event that the radical coalition of Syriza triumphed in the forthcoming election (Varoufakis had been acting as the party’s unofficial advisor since 2013 and his outspoken opposition to destructive European Union bailouts was beginning to win support for a defiant, unorthodox alternative to austerity).

As whistleblowers go, Varoufakis is surprisingly measured and composed, telling his tale with refreshing good grace, and with a rare capacity to identify and acknowledge his own mistakes. Nevertheless, any 550-page account by a serious economist intent on detailing the considerably thorny subject of his country’s malicious bankruptcy can’t help but get itself enmeshed in a thicket of statistics every once in a while. Some of these bear repeating: unemployment soared from 7% to 27%; national income fell by 28%; healthcare expenditure was cut by 11.1% between 2009 and 2011, while 36% of the population currently lives at risk of poverty and social exclusion.  

Varoufakis, however, guides us ably through the minefield of facts and figures with the same relaxed charm and sense of humour that he displays while reviewing the papers on the Marr Show or on his annual pilgrimage to the Hay Festival (standing ovation guaranteed), and this makes for an engaging and easy read despite the intricacy of the subject matter. The following, somewhat lengthy extract, proves the point -

‘The German finance minister Wolfgang Schauble once told me that my opposition to austerity placed me in a minority of Europeans, citing opinion polls showing support for government expenditure cuts. I replied that, even if that were true, a majority can be wrong about the cause of their malaise. During the Black Death of the fourteenth century, I reminded him, most Europeans believed the plague was caused by sinful living and could be exorcised by bloodletting and self-flagellation. And when bloodletting and self-flagellation did not work, this was taken as evidence that people’s repentance was not sincere enough, that not enough blood had been let, that the flagellation was insufficiently enthusiastic - exactly as now when austerity’s abysmal failure is cited as proof that it has been applied too half-heartedly. If he was amused, Wolfgang did not show it’.

At the heart of his intriguing book, is Varoufakis’ head-on confrontation with the troika: the European Commission; the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, all of whom emerge as essentially duplicitous and anti-democratic institutions in their dealings with the Greek government. Time and again the troikas’ apparatchiks doctored agreed communications or withdrew concessions they had made 24 hours earlier while French ministers routinely engaged in doublespeak, supporting Greece in private only to cow-tow to Germany at Eurogroup meetings. Varoufakis often conceded ground, offering his opponents ingenious and imaginative solutions to a crisis that threatened to tear Europe apart. The troika was never interested, not for a moment. Austerity was the only (crooked) game in town!  Few people emerge from the book with any credit - in Washington, Bernie Sanders tried in vain to pressurise the IMF and, surprisingly perhaps, Emmanuel Macron, then the French economy minister attempted to convince President Hollande to back a more ‘sustainable solution’ to the crisis. Macron even visited Varoufakis after he’d been deposed in order to clarify his support for the beleaguered ex-minister.  

Of more interest, perhaps, to British readers post-Brexit and in light of our forthcoming detachment from Europe’s power brokers, is the other relationship at the heart of the book. From the moment that Varoufakis accepted the toxic post of finance minister, he doubted that Tsipras and his ragbag ‘war cabinet’, suspiciously stuffed with bankers chums, would have the resolve to take on the troika in a fight to the death. Time and again he counseled his wavering colleagues that they could not bluff their way out of economic collapse; they had to commit to a negotiating strategy that sought to convince Angela Merkel and co that Syriza would opt for Grexit rather than accept roll-over bailouts that only served to escalate debt and poverty to stratospheric levels. Only then, argued Varoufakis, would the troika, recoiling from a policy that might lead to the disintegration of their beloved European project, abandon its fateful obsession with austerity and finally agree to meaningful talks on restructuring the massive Greek debt.that austerity had brought crashing down on the poorest members of society.

Yanis and Alexis: Bromance followed by betrayal

The betrayal, when it came, was swift, stunning and incredibly bizarre. Having called for and won a referendum to reaffirm their anti-austerity mandate (an inspirational 61.3% voted in favour of continuing to resist a merciless troika), it gradually dawned on Varoufakis that he was almost the only minister at Maximos Mansions, the Greek prime minister’s official residence, in a celebratory mood. Tsipras and his cabinet, openly despondent at having won the vote, were behaving as if they had been heavily defeated. Even as the results were being announced, Tsipras was firing Varoufakis as finance minister (offering him a token post at the department of culture as a consolation), thereby signaling an irreversible surrender to the troika and an acceptance of punishing austerity*. Returning home, Varoufakis could only tell his partner Danae ‘Tonight we had the curious phenomenon of a government overthrowing its people’.

It’s to Varoufakis’ credit, then, that the book closes with a moving and objective analysis of a leader who betrayed the cause that they had both fought for,

‘Friends and critics criticise me for having seen things in Alexis that were not there. I think they are wrong. His desire to liberate Greece from its vicious cycle was there. His intelligence and capacity to learn quickly were self-evident. His enthusiasm for the deterrent I had proposed and the debt relief I was prioritizing was real. The reason that I had seen all these things in him was that they were there. When he instructed me, on our first day in office, to hand over the keys to our offices to the opposition rather than capitulate, he was not lying. The part of him telling me that was speaking the truth. This is why I was brought to tears by his words. This is why I believed him’.

* On the 15th of June 2017, the latest Greek bailout was agreed to the tune of 8.5 billion Euros. Once again, there was no agreement to cancel Greek debt.

Below is an extract from Yanis Varoufakis’ analysis of the deal

In short, poor pensioners will annually forfeit one of their twelve-monthly pension payments, as a result of a reduction in the threshold above which income tax is withheld. For a country where one in two families have no one working in it, and thus have to survive on some small pension that a grandparent collects, this is a socially devastating cut. Moreover, it will also lead to further small business failures (due to the large multiplier effect of reducing a small pension: when poor families reduce their spending in local shops already on the brink, many of these will go under), the result being more people on the scrapheap of unemployment and fewer contributors to the stressed pension funds.

His article can be read in full here

https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2017/06/16/the-annotated-15th-june-2017-eurogroup-statement-on-greece/

Further reading on the statistics quoted above

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/may/13/suicides-of-benefit-claimants-reveal-dwp-flaws-says-inquiry

http://www.partnersinsalford.org/documents/DWP_Benefit_Conditionality_and_Sanctions_in_Salford_-

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/223050/incap_decd_recips_0712.pdf

_

[nigeiadigitalmarketingcompany]

Britain After Brexit: Welcome to the Vulture Restaurant

Digital Elixir Britain After Brexit: Welcome to the Vulture Restaurant

Yves here. We pointed out some time ago that the idea that the UK would get a favorable trade deal with the UK post-Brexit, and particularly post a crash-out, was bonkers, so it’s good to have official confirmation, even if it comes from the likes of Larry Summers. The US typically dictates terms in bi-lateral trade deals, allowing at most only a bit of face-saving terms-tweaking at the margin. The power imbalance will be even more pronounced in trade negotiation in the wake of Brexit because the UK will be desperate to cinch a deal quickly, and the urgency will give the US even more leverage.

More quotes from the Summers interview on BBC Radio 4, courtesy Al Jazeera:

“I’m not sure what Britain wants from the United States that it can plausibly imagine the United States will give.”

“If Britain thinks that the American financial regulators – who have great difficulty coming together on anything – are going to come together to give greater permissions and less regulation of UK firms, I would call that belief close to delusional.”

Nevertheless, the Wall Street Journal found a whimsical Brexit angle today, although it could just as easily have been spun as gallows humor: Tired of Waiting for Brexit, Britons Munch Through Nutella Stockpiles (any Northern Ireland readers may take umbrage at “Britons”):

Britain’s Brexit preppers have been stockpiling for months. Now their revolution is eating itself.

Fed up with waiting for the U.K. to leave the European Union and mindful of product expiration dates, stockpilers are using up foodstuffs they had squirreled away in case of a blunt exit leaves them cut off from imported treats, or spikes the price of necessities, like toilet paper and tea.

The chance of a no-deal divorce hasn’t diminished and may only have been postponed until Oct. 31, but some preppers can’t resist breaking into their stashes.

Elizabeth Priest, 29, found it easy to eat into her stockpile because she had socked away delectable items such as Nutella and mozzarella from Italy, lactose-free milk from Denmark and an awful lot of tea—not, say, Spam.

“Because we bought nice things, we weren’t facing down this nasty stockpile of tinned ham,” says the writer from Hastings on Britain’s southern coast. She brewed the last of her 200 stockpiled tea bags on June 29, three months to the day after Britain was meant to leave the EU.

Returning to the theme of this post, it’s not clear what could be strip mined from the UK. Unlike Russia post the collapse of the USSR, there aren’t natural resources that to be bought on the cheap and sold in world markets. North Sea oil is largely played out. UK manufacturing capacity will become much less valuable due to post-Brexit non-tariff trade barriers. Sadly, the big wealth opportunities may lie in moves like acquiring real estate and squeeing already not-well-housed working people with higher rents, and dismantling the NHS.

By Adam Ramsay, the co-editor of openDemocracyUK and also works with Bright Green. Before, he was a full-time campaigner with People & Planet. You can follow him at @adamramsay. Originally published at openDemocracy

“Britain has no leverage, Britain is desperate … it needs an agreement very soon. When you have a desperate partner, that’s when you strike the hardest bargain.” So warned former US Treasury secretary Larry Summers on Radio 4 ‘Today’ programme this morning, as new foreign secretary Dominic Raab jets off on a tour of North America to investigate potential trade deals.

“Britain has much less to give than Europe as a whole did, therefore less reason for the United States to make concessions,” said Summers, a senior figure in both the Clinton and Obama administrations. “You make more concessions dealing with a wealthy man than you do dealing with a poor man.”

Summers is of course right. But he makes a key mistake. He assumes that Raab, Johnson and the new cabinet care about defending the interests and autonomy of most people in the UK. He seems to be under the impression that Brexit was about taking back control.

In reality, the brand of Brexit promoted by Tory hardliners has long been about pulling Britain under the shadow of American capital. Not as a 51st state, with votes and constitutional rights, but as an outhouse for US business, a sort of colder, paler version of Puerto Rico.

We will be forced to accept US-style deregulation, with its poor standards for workers and consumers. We will have our assets stripped clean off the bone. Even before Brexit, we are fast becoming a pawn in the Pentagon’s global games.

We won’t become Americans, though. We’ll have no say in the standards that will govern our new Atlantic common market. Nor will we be permitted to help decide who stands in the planet’s biggest pulpit. Nor will we have much significant say in our own foreign policy. The UK has chosen to shift from participating in one power block to sitting on the outer edges of another.

Victory of the Lobbyists

If that wasn’t clear before (though it was), the events surrounding the arrival of Boris Johnson in Downing Street have confirmed it.

During the leadership election there was, of course, the failure to defend Kim Darroch, the British ambassador to the US. Then there is the ongoing confrontation with Iran, in which Britain’s post-empire is being enlisted in the schemes of US neoconservatives. There is the revelation that a new US pro-Brexit campaign group has launched, and Steve Bannon’s insistence on ‘Today’ that Boris Johnson should deliver a “no deal, hard out”.

Over the past three years, we’ve seen Britain’s lobbying industry and think-tanks auction their access to our politicians off to US corporations and oligarchs – from the firm which ran Johnson’s leadership campaign bragging in Washington about its ability to shape Brexit for US business, to the Institute for Economic Affairs offering to broker meetings between senior ministers and US companies wishing to get their piece of the Brexit pie.

We’ve seen one former Washington lobbyist – Shanker Singham – move to London and secure unprecedented access to our politicians, even writing the so-called Malthouse compromise, while lobbyists also drove the team that ensured their preferred candidate was elected prime minister.

And now that they’ve got their Johnson in place lobbyists have taken over the cabinet.

We’ve seen Trump confirm that “everything” – including the NHS – “will be on the table” in a US trade deal, before his spin-doctors reminded him that he’s not supposed to say that out loud.

“Britain Trump”

We see it in the ascent of Johnson himself – a rise which has coincided with the arrival in the UK of the sorts of institutions and culture we’re more used to watching from a safe distance across the Atlantic. On openDemocracy, we’ve revealed how Definers Public Affairs, the smear machine which destroyed Hillary Clinton, has set up shop in the UK, how a US-style super PAC is being rolled out across Europe and how Brexit is the biggest outsourcing of public policy in British history.

Johnson, who has surfed this wave, has been anointed “Britain Trump” by his US admirer. It’s a fair nickname, not because they have the same character, but because they both epitomise the elitist myths embedded in their respective national characters. Trump is the millionaire’s son who pretends to be rich because of merit, the brash bully-boy billionaire in a culture whose dream equates wealth and cruelty with merit and success.

Johnson, on the other hand, comes from the school on whose playing fields the battle of Waterloo was mythologically won. He epitomises an Anglo-British exceptionalism built on a mystical link between nation, royalty and aristocracy: a link forged in the failed revolution of the civil war and bought with imperial plunder, and which reminds the British bourgeois of an era when you didn’t need to do your homework to attain power – you got it by dint of your nation, gender, class and skin colour.

Likewise, their identikit ideologies are the same: oligarch enrichment woven round national mythologies.

Johnson pretends to be a free trader in the way that earlier British politicians claimed to support free trade whilst using their military might to force China to buy opium, commit genocide in Tasmania and smash up cotton looms in India. Trump claims to be a protectionist just as earlier US presidents used a pretence of isolationism to pretend they weren’t building an empire, at the same time preaching that the US was manifestly and justifiably destined to conquer the whole North American continent, committing genocide against Native American peoples as they did so.

Both Trump and Johnson have been contorted by the distorting lenses of their respective nationalisms, confusing many into thinking that they ooze truth or charm or talent. Strip off those red white and blue tinted goggles and you quickly see them for what they are: rich racists willing to trample anyone to secure the world for their kind.

Ultimately, they both represent the same interwoven set of interests: oligarchs, mafiosi, disaster capitalists, Gulf oil millionaires, hedge fund speculators and any other corner of the elite which has spotted that the neoliberal era is coming to an end, they have few places left to invest and their best option is to hide away as much money as they can behind the biggest walls they can build.

This is what Johnson meant when he said “fuck business” – that he and his friends no longer have anything invested in traditional industries, so are happy to see them disappear. It is why Trump is perfectly happy to fuck America’s car industry as he slashes tax for the hyper-rich.

Useful Scraps of Empire

At openDemocracy, we’ve revealed how millions of pounds were pumped into the Leave campaigns in the first place. That money came through the same British Overseas Territory and Crown Dependency secrecy areas that the billionaires of the world use to stash the cash they can no longer figure out how to get a return from – the same post-empire that the Pentagon is so keen to get a closer grip on.

For while the UK’s network of semi-colonies is useful as a money-laundry for the world’s oligarchs, we’ve seen in recent weeks how it plays a different strategic role, too – why America might see it as a valuable asset to begin to enclose under its wings.

When the British territory of Gibraltar captured an Iranian tanker, supposedly to enforce an EU embargo against oil to Syria, it did so despite the fact that Iran isn’t in the EU, and the EU doesn’t force non-members to comply with its embargoes. The Spanish have, according to The Guardian, claimed that the UK is acting under the influence of the US, and the former Swedish prime minister and senior EU figure Carl Bilt has hinted as much. It looks very much like this wasn’t so much an act of British foreign policy as one of submission to the US Department of Defense.

Britain captured Gibraltar in 1704 because of its strategically important location. To this day, one-third of the world’s oil and gas passes through its straits. Likewise, another strategically vital waterway will define this conflict: the Gulf of Oman, which connects the Strait of Hormuz to the Arabian sea. Oman isn’t formally a British territory, but it has been a de facto UK colony since the nineteenth century, with London helping to prop up the slave-owning ruling family over two centuries. As Ian Cobain has outlined, its current sultan was put in place by an MI6 coup in 1970.

The relationship remains strong. Shell owns 30% of the national oil company and Britain’s military presence is significant. According to Duncan Campbell, the journalist who originally revealed the existence of GCHQ, the Snowden leaks revealed Oman hosts a vital British intelligence base, tapping the vast number of communications cables that run under the Gulf. Last year, the UK opened a permanent naval base in the country, and in February this year, the British government announced it had signed an historic defence agreement with the sultanate, “bringing us even closer to one of our most important partners”.

For those with long memories, this might start sounding familiar: the 45-minute claim intended to frighten the British into accepting the 2003 Iraq war was based on the claim that Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction could be ready to deploy not against London, but against the British Overseas Territories in Cyprus.

If the Pentagon is to keep a firm grip on the world, Britain’s post-imperial web of semi-colonies will be vital fingerholds, and Brexit offers the US a unique opportunity to expand its control over the UK and its overseas assets.

The Great British Asset Striptease

This wasn’t inevitable. In theory, Brexit could genuinely have been about ‘taking back control’ for the British people. It would be possible to turn the UK into a new Cuba, for instance, substituting home-grown products for international imports. Not a suggestion that would please the millions of Leave voters who opted to quit the EU essentially because they wanted to become another Japan instead: wealthier than the UK, industrialised, with less income inequality, richly forested and deeply racist.

But these are not the options before us.

Instead, Brexit means plonking the corpse of post-imperial Britain in a vulture restaurant for US asset strippers, and pretending not to notice that China perches nearby, ready to pluck at whatever it fancies too.

The Great British Asset Striptease isn’t new, of course. For decades, the country has mostly stayed afloat in the world by auctioning off the plunder we accumulated through centuries of empire. As Joe Guinan and Thomas Hanna point out, the Treasury has calculated that Britain sold off 40 per cent of all assets privatised across the OECD between 1980 and 1996.

But as the new foreign secretary heads off on his ‘everything must go’ tour of North America, the people of the UK are going to have to fight hard to stop him selling the whole country to Trump and his friends. Just as thousands mobilised against the EU-US trade deal known as TTIP, we’re going to have to stand together and fight against any UK/US trade deal. We’re going to have to fight to protect our public services and our workers’ rights and our ecosystems from the new plunderers of the planet. Because Britain doesn’t have any power in its negotiations with Trump. And we have a government that will be delighted to turn the country into an offshore theme park for American, Saudi and Chinese billionaires.

Britain After Brexit: Welcome to the Vulture Restaurant

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[thetrafficseouk-blog]

Election results: Lib Dems win Cotswold District Council

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Election results: Lib Dems win Cotswold District Council

Image caption The Lib Dems overturned a previous Tory majority of 10 to take control

The Lib Dems have taken control of Cotswold District Council from the Conservatives.

The Tories lost their majority of 10 seats, with the Lib Dems winning 18 of the 34 seats up for grabs.

The Greens, who launched a local group in the area four years ago, won their first seat, taking the Rissingtons ward from the Tories.

Another seat was taken from the Conservatives by an independent candidate.

The council’s Conservative group leader Tony Berry said he would ask the prime minister to “consider her position very carefully” after the local election results.

However, Mr Berry said: “I do recognise there are very, very many things in play here.

“Not just protest votes, but I think when we look into the figures we also find there’s a much lower turnout than usual and of course that skews everything. It’s a very unusual set of circumstances.”

Media playback is unsupported on your device

Media captionConservative Party leader at Cotswold District Council Tony Berry: ‘I’d ask PM to consider her position’

Asked what reasons he was picking up on the doorstep about why people were not voting Conservative, Mr Berry blamed Brexit and “professional politicians who are basically working for themselves rather than necessarily what is best for the country”.

He said his message to Mrs May would be “to consider her position very carefully”.

Meanwhile, another independent candidate, Kevin Painter, is seeking legal action after he lost to the Conservatives by one vote in Tetbury Town ward, where there was a tie.

Officials then looked through the spoiled ballots and accepted a paper where the voter had written “Brexit” with an arrow to the Conservative candidate.

Mr Painter described the decision as “absolutely shocking”.

The council said it had consulted the guidelines in the Electoral Commission’s booklet on doubtful papers and examples within election law books.

Analysis

By BBC Radio Gloucestershire politics reporter Hayley Mortimer

After 16 years of Conservative control the Liberal Democrats have won enough seats to take over the running of Cotswold District Council.

As counting got under way it became clear that smaller parties and independents were benefiting from a disenchanted electorate.

In the end, the Liberal Democrats took seven seats from the Conservatives – enough to have a majority.

It was a disappointing night for the Conservatives – they also lost a seat to an independent and to the Green Party.

It is the first time a Green councillor has been elected to the district council.

The Conservatives are blaming the loses on Brexit. Group leader Tony Berry said it was time for Theresa May to resign.

He said many Conservative voters simply stayed at home in protest.

But the Lib Dems said there were local issues at play too, in particular the council’s handling of the Chesterton development – 2,350 homes on the outskirts of Cirencester.

The Conservatives have received a lot of negative press attention and the Lib Dems say that voters are just fed up.

Either search using your postcode or council name or click around the map to show local results.

Result not in yet

All councils Changed councils

Back to: Gloucestershire News

[vivalasthedas]

ranting, if you know me IRL don’t read 

Here’s the thing

I get that yay labour got more seats, I get that the tories lost 12. I get that labour won some historic victories in terms of locations.

And I know, I know, that people are looking for a victory where they can take it and trying to be optimistic. But when it’s done in condescending tones of this is great this is wonderful best outcome we could expect

I want to scream

This, at best, stops things getting worst. Which is a damn good thing, don’t get me wrong, I’d sooner have this outcome than any other predicted ones. But that doesn’t make it a wonderful totally awesome outcome

Labour have three more seats than they dead post 2010 election, the first I was old enough to vote in. Only three more. The tories also have more seats than they did back then (by a wider margin). And I think most people would see that ConDem government as a very big downward turn. It did not go great.

 Labour were not magically able to stop the shit that went down then, they wont be able to here.

Yes it’s not an exact correlation because this time LibDems aren’t tied to the tories, but this time unless every member of libdems and labour oppose decisisons it’snot going to magically stop things.

And just stopping it getting worse is, and can only ever be, a temporary measure. And living in right wing safe areas makes it feel much worse, you notice this shit much more. When you have friends who are already having trouble just getting what they need to stay the fuck alive with the way it is, just keeping it the same isn’t great.

I get that people need a victory, but if someone who has seen this shit happen before, who has been through this more than you, is angry and pissed off. Jumping in with bad attempts at optimism which is done in a super condescending ‘but didn’t you know’ sort of way…. It’s not good. You can optimism without condescention. You try to figure out if they want that, you give it time if it’s brand new and they need it, and you don’t do starshine lollipops everything is great hurrah. You hey, at least it didn’t get worse. You well at least they’re probably going to stop much more damage happening. You don’t try to sell stagnation as a wonderful victory.

Best outcome we could expect would’ve happened if labour hadn’t tried to be moderate and spent most of the campaign undermining their own leader. Best outcome would’ve been more SNP and Labour. 

What happened is a sign of a broken system. A depressing reminder than in this country people can be in charge, and can have the final say in who’s in charge without it being close to what the people want. I’ve seen this before in ths country. 

I’ve seen failed attempts at changing voting too, made no better but more complicated. ‘This is a great victory, this is amazing’ nope. Nah. It’s a bandaid. And it’s still highly indicative of how fucked up the way things work is here. 

[d2kvirus]

Dickheads of the Month: August 2019

As it seems that there are people who say or do things that are remarkably dickheaded yet somehow people try to make excuses for them or pretend it never happened, here is a collection of some of the dickheaded actions we saw in the month of August 2019 to make sure that they are never forgotten. 

When there was the possibility of the parliamentary sovereignty that Leavers harp on about, off sprinted proven liar Boris Johnson to Balmoral to beg the Queen to suspend parliament in order to force through a No Deal Britait - but of course, everyone but him are the “traitors” in this sordid affair, even after Ben Wallace apparently forgot that cameras and microphones exist when blabbing about how Johnson did this due to fearing that his working majority of one wouldn't survive a No Confidence vote

It was so nice of Michael Coudrey to post a blatantly faked screenshot of El Paso shooter Patrick Crusias’ MyLife profile page to try and claim that Crusas was a left-wing extremist rather than, oh I don’t know, a white supremacist who happened to parrot several of Trump’s soundbites about Hispanics, let alone consider that maybe mass shootings are something that shouldn’t happen with alarming frequency

Meanwhile it was equally predictable that Paul Joseph Watson was jumping up and down yelling “See!  See!  A leftist went on a killing spree!” which not only made it obvious he was trying to divert attention from the El Paso shooter, but also drew attention to the fact that while the alt right were tripping over one another to make excuses for Patrick Crusas as he’s some poor innocent victim of society, as soon as it emerged that Connor Betts isn’t one of them the excuses evaporated

So naturally, peak twattery followed when Dmitriy Andreychenko walked into his local Missouri branch of Walmart toting a tactical rifle and handgun while wearing body armor, and when he was arrested for being such a monumental fuckwit he bleated something about testing to see if Walmart respected his Second Amendment rights

Yet somehow the UK couldn’t laugh at Americans trying to blame video games for mass shootings thanks to Priti Patel trying to create a direct link between stabbings and fried chicken

Of course Jo Swinson has taken it upon herself to say she and only she can stop Britait, which was obvious by her rejecting Jeremy Corbyn’s proposal of an interim government out of hand without any reason in spite of the fact that, as Leader of the Opposition, of a vote of no confidence in Boris Johnson does get through the Commons it will be Corbyn who is asked to put together an interim government - but Jo Swinson instead suggested the first tow backbenchers she could think of because she cannot countenance the idea of Labour stopping Britait, as at that point what is she other than somebody who lies about her voting record?

This month it was Arron Banks who wanted to sound triggered to a sociopathic degree by Greta Thunberg with his lovely response to her yachting across the Atlantic by tweeting that freak yachting accidents tend to happen at this time of year, while Julia Halfwit Hartley-Brewer posted some lame tweet gloating about she and her family would be flying across the Atlantic instead, meanwhile Roger Helmer resorted to calling her a “Swedish pixie” during one of the rare occasions he remained awake when in public and Paul Joseph Watson talked about how an autistic girl was being “exploited” - but because Arron Banks has to be Arron Banks, he had to have the most cuntish last word and said it was just a joke...like saying women wearing burqas look like letterboxes

As if proven liar Boris Johnson hadn’t used the NHS as a platform for his outright lies enough in the past three years, he pledged an increase in funding...that was actually funding that NHS providers had been saving up for the past three years, but had been unable to spend in that time as the Tory government banned them from spending it...until it became convenient enough to allow them to spend their own money

If only somebody suggested to Lou Dobbs that, if you see a group of protesters sat in the road outside the ICE facility that employs you, driving your truck just inches from their faces is guaranteed to piss them off - and then using that as an excuse to plow through the pissed off crowd is guaranteed to cost you your job and piss off everyone bar the weirdos who believe it’s not vehicular assault if you run into people with differing opinions to you

It clearly did not occur to Steve King when trying to find a logical reason to say abortions should be banned that saying the human race may not exist if not for cases of rape and incest tens of thousands of years ago doesn’t in any way defend his position, instead make it sound uncannily like he’s on the side of those who raped and pillaged

It didn’t take long before Boris Johnson started reading from the Bannon playbook, stating that he would not take interviews with the press as they’re all biased against him - yes, even the BBC, the Murdoch Empire, the Daily Mail and Daily Express, all of whom have been churning out unthinkingly slanted headlines in his favour

It was so nice that James Cleverly repeatedly wanted to talk about how the Tory MP  William Wilberforce fought to end slavery...even after it was pointed out to him the first time he made that statement that Wilberforce stood as an independent and not a Tory, no matter how many times Cleverly tries to rewrite history

Let’s see if I’ve got this straight: the Lib Dems state that they will do everything in their power to stop Britait...yet Jo Swinson has ruled out going into coalition with either Labour or the SNP, in spite the fact they both have far more MPs than the Lib Dems and just so happen to also be opposing Britait

Similarly, the best idea Caroline Lucas had for solving Britait was for an all-woman cabinet that just so happened to include her, Jo Swinson, Heidi Allen, Justine Greening, Yvette Cooper and Anna Soubry among others - and seemed confused when it was mentioned that not only did her dream cabinet exclude all men but it didn’t include a single non-white MP either, and appears to have forgotten that a woman spent between 2016-19 fucking the process up at every turn

In the latest Priti Patel brainfart, she suggested that migrants earning less than £36,000 a year are no longer welcome in the UK...clearly failing to comprehend that arbitrary figure is higher than the basic salary of any member of NHS staff, any teacher or any police officer - you know, something a Home Secretary should be able to understand...

Walking proof that nominative determinism isn't really a thing James Cleverley could only try and claim that the leaked Operation Yellowhammer dossier was “out of date” and was no remotely relevant to any discussion about what would happen if the UK leaves the EU without a deal...even though the dossier was dated 1st August 2019

There was something deeply sinister about how the BBC described Owen Jones as a “Labour activist” after he was assaulted, as opposed to...oh I don’t know?  A journalist?

With the Leave hardcore now lionising chlorinated chicken of all things, it;s not surprise that Darren Grimes tried to say there’s no issue because we also have chlorinated water...somehow spectacularly missing the point

I have no idea how the Entertainment Software Association managed to bungle so badly that they managed to release the personal information of thousands of people who attended this year’s E3, including games journalists and Youtubers/Twitch streamers, but they managed it nonetheless

In a quite remarkable turn of events there was a controversy regarding Borderlands 3 that didn’t involve Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford, instead it was Take Two Interactive sending private investigators to the doorstep of Youtuber SupMatto to harass him into keeping quiet, and because he wasn’t keeping quiet they abused Youtube’s copyright system on an industrial scale with over 100 copyright strikes to force him off the platform because of reasons

For a documentarian Stacey Dooley makes an awful lot of factual blunders, the latest of which being a Panorama documentary where she described a Muslim prayer gesture as an “ISIS salute”, leading to the BBC removing the clip from the documentary...on the iPlayer, but leaving it in unchallenged for its initial broadcast

You would think that Microsoft wouldn’t be so dense as to release an update that cripples the computers of everyone using Windows 7 due to somebody typing a 2 instead of a 1 in one line of code, but that’s exactly what happened with the KB4512506 update that was coded by someone who assumed everyone has Windows 10

As it was time for Suzanne Moore to vomit another opinion piece into the pages of the Guardian, she took it upon herself to write a piece that managed to insinuate that Shilpa Shetty somehow deserved the racial abuse she received from Jade Goody, Jo O’Meara and Danielle Lloyd on Celebrity Big Brother back in 2007 because...hold on a minute...because Shetty had servants at home while the others didn’t which apparently makes it alright

The outraged howls from Manchester City fans and football pundits alike all because VAR rightly disallowed what would have been a last-minute winner for City was truly a sight to behold, because apparently VAR exists to make things easier for a small kabal of teams and everyone else can get fucked

...and demonstrated by Mike Dean using The Wenger Defence of “I didn’t see it guv” a week later to overrule VAR stating that Tottenham should have been awarded a penalty

...and yet the depths were truly plumbed when Ian Holloway blamed the EU for the fact he doesn’t understand the offside law, even though as a football pundit (and former manager) he’s literally paid to understand it

Ooblets developers Glumberland decided to double down on their dickheadishness which began with their smug and condescending blog post explaining why they decided to make their game an Epic Games Store exclusive, but they followed that up by acting like complete bellends on their Discord that culminated with them responding to somebody asking when they could buy the game with their own currency by telling them that nobody owed them the game

With both Bury and Bolton facing extinction, trust Sky Sports News to cover this by having a clock ticking down in the corner of the screen all day, as if the possibility (and, in Bury’s case, eventuality) of a club being kicked out of the league was the same thing as Deadline Day

Britain’s most triggered man Piers Moron Morgan was predictably irked by the Meghan Markle guest-editing Vogue because obviously somebody doing that is only after the publicity...a sentiment he neglected to express when Kate Middleton did the exact same thing a few years previously

The sensible thing that Bethesda should have done after the have done after the humiliation conga line that was Fallout 76 was try not to do anything that would irritate gamers further.  So instead they decided that, when releasing Doom - that’s the 1993 original, not the 2016 reboot - it would require players to use their Bethesda account to play the actual game 

I know it’s a cheapshot, but did UKIP really elect somebody named Dick Braine as their new leader?

How the hell did Apple develop a credit card that gets discoloured if it touches materials such as denim or leather, or to put it another way if it’s in somebody’s pocket or wallet?  What are they supposed to do?  Carry it around in their hand at maximum reach?

If you have a name like Michael Buerk it isn’t a good idea to make your name fair game, but that’s exactly what he did when he suggested that it’s potentially a good thing for obese people to die early as it would save the NHS money

And of course, it wouldn't be a month without Donald Trump being a colossal cockhead, and he certainly disappoint with his prioritising schmoozing with guests at Mar A Lago while people in Dayton and El Paso were experiencing the aftermath of their respective mass shootings, and when the Orange Overlord deigned to make a statement he not only demonstrated he couldn’t give a toss by talking about the mass shootings in Toledo and El Paso, but his response to it being plain for all to see that white nationalism was the catalyst for both was to blame video games for all of society’s ills

[courtneytincher]

The Most Important Brexiter Isn’t  Boris Johnson

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- In the highly entertaining Channel 4 drama about the 2016 referendum campaign “Brexit: The Uncivil War,” Benedict Cumberbatch, playing the mastermind of the Vote Leave campaign, is sometimes found crouched in the narrow pantry where he retreats to think. It’s not hard to picture the real Dominic Cummings doing just that.Cummings is no mere political curiosity. Though unelected and without a seat at the cabinet table, he is U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s most important adviser. A master of the focus group and the targeted digital ad, he will play a critical role in any early election or second referendum on Brexit.The Johnson-Cummings pairing could be largely a matter of short-term expedience. Johnson wants a proven hand to carry out his “do or die” Oct. 31 Brexit pledge and win an election. But it could also be about something beyond Brexit. At the heart of the new government are two ambitious men possessed by a sense of history, some would say grandiosity, and an appetite for taking big gambles.For Cummings, Brexit is a means to a greater end: a complete overhaul of the machinery of government. This might have been started long ago, but Margaret Thatcher, that icon of the British right, didn’t go far enough in Cummings’s view. She shied away from reforming the civil service, whose inefficiencies Cummings finds maddening. He wants to finish the job he started with Vote Leave by using insights from the world of computing, physics, warfare and sport. If he stays beyond Brexit, Cummings will have to prove his ideas aren’t some utopian vision.But there’s a paradox: The political upheaval caused by Brexit may have opened the door to change, but the chaos of a no-deal Brexit could make the very reforms he seeks impossible to implement.No Ordinary BrexiterCummings cannot be confused with your garden variety no-deal Brexiter. He notes in one of his many, lengthy blog posts that he is “not a Tory libertarian, ‘populist,’ or anything else.” That explains his deep disdain for the “narcissist-delusional” group of hard-core Brexiters in the party. For them, leaving the EU is an ideological necessity and a mark of tribal loyalty. He isn’t one of that tribe, or any tribe. He even went so far, in a twitter exchange in 2017, as to say the referendum may have been a mistake.Most political advisers operate in the shadows, but Cummings is the subject of an endless stream of profiles; in a country that worships eccentricity, he is a journalistic gift that keeps on giving. He also invites inspection. His wide-ranging, occasionally breathless writings provide a dizzying tour of the innovators, historical figures, athletes and scientists who have informed his thinking. His political philosophy incorporates insights from Prussian Otto von Bismarck, interface design wizard Bret Victor, physicist and computer scientist Michael Nielsen, T.S. Eliot and many more.To imagine a Cummings-led takeover of the British state, visualize a room resembling a NASA launch control center in which Bismarck is huddled with, say, a crack team of designers and coders on loan from Apple. Bismarck, the “blood and iron” chancellor who distrusted democracy, is important. Cummings also singles out for praise the Chinese Communist Party for its “use of proven systems management techniques for integrating principles of effective action to predict and manage complex systems at large scale.”For the cadres of civil servants orbiting Downing Street, some might find Cummings’s own verdict of their world makes for uncomfortable reading:Critical institutions (including the senior civil service and the parties) are programmed to fight to stay dysfunctional, they fight to stay closed and avoid learning about high performance, they fight to exclude the most able people.His writings reveal strong views on education reform (he has written controversially that policy-makers too easily discount the role of genetics in achievement), immigration (doesn’t like the low-skilled type) and European agricultural subsidies (thinks them absurd although apparently a farm he co-owns benefits handsomely from them).We don’t know much about what he thinks is the right fiscal policy in an ultra-low interest rate borderline recessionary environment. He’s said little about whether U.S.-style regulations necessary for a trade agreement are an acceptable substitute for EU-style rules.OODA Loop Indeed, policy specifics seem less important to Cummings than design problems and engineering effective decision-making systems in government. He’s a big fan of the OODA loop, the decision-making cycle developed by the late military strategist and Air Force fighter pilot John Boyd. The sequence – observe, orient, design and act – enables the practitioner, originally fighter pilots, to stay one step ahead of their opponents, constantly taking in new information and using it.Doing the OODA loop well requires clear-eyed awareness of your own blind spots, something Cummings sometimes seems to lack. In his blogging days, he would occasionally respond to reader comments. But when readers questioned whether his views smacked of utopianism, or asked for a few examples of where changes he proposes had been road-tested in government, he didn’t reply.He cannot, however, be accused of thinking small. Think of him as a cross between Steve Bannon and Dick Cheney. Cummings would like to harness the extreme preparation and concentration of people like solo free climber Alex Honnold. This ideal of the super-athlete civil servant feeds into his view that selection for politics and government should be like winnowing the great from the also-rans in music or sport. That sounds appealing, but of course the French train up an uber-elite for government roles and still wound up with the gilets jaunes and stubbornly high levels of unemployment.  Held in contempt of parliament earlier this year, he appears bent on undermining elected lawmakers by persuading his boss to ignore constitutional convention in pursuing a no-deal Brexit. He is not one to sacrifice his agenda on the altar of careerism either. Indeed, former Prime Minister David Cameron once called him a “career psychopath.” So as long as Cummings is around, it’s fair to say that the Johnson Plan is the Cummings Plan.Homer Simpson MomentHis opponents, particularly on the left, paint him as self-important, hypocritical and a caricature of the mad genius rather than the real thing. After former Attorney General and anti-Brexit lawmaker Dominic Grieve said he was arrogant and didn’t understand the British constitution, Cummings snidely replied, “Mr. Grieve, we’ll see what he’s right about.” “Not since Homer Simpson sat on a sofa trying to get to grips with the mystery of his own obesity while simultaneously eating donuts, can any TV viewing audience have had irony spoon-fed to them with such generous ease,” wrote the Independent’s Tom Peck.The bigger Homerian irony is Brexit itself. Cummings’s entire theory of remaking government is based on the criticism that, as he put it, “most of everybody’s day is spent just battling entropy – it is not pursuing priorities and building valuable things.” What exactly does he think people’s days will be spent doing when they confront tariffs and new regulatory barriers to trade? When they spend time and money duplicating EU bureaucracies or finding new sources of funding for scientific programs? Entropy indeed.If not an ideologue, he is at least an idealist and they can easily flame out once in power. His very critique of the hierarchical, fixed mind-set machinery of government suggests he would find the plodding experience of overhauling a bureaucracy, as opposed to the adrenaline rush of directing a referendum or election campaign, highly frustrating if he got the chance. The civil servants he wants to turn into decision-making Olympians may not play along. It’s not enough for revolutionaries to have vision, they also need charisma.Known for his brash style, Cummings doesn’t hold back on those he deems lesser beings, once referring to David Davis, the former Brexit secretary, as “thick as mince, lazy as a toad and vain as Narcissus.” (Davis didn’t make it into Johnson’s cabinet.) As reports filter out of special advisers being fired without warning, one wonders whether he’ll inspire enough loyalty to carry through his grander plans.For now, though, it’s Johnson’s confidence that gives Cummings’s ideas wings. If he helps deliver Brexit and win an election that will no doubt secure him a sainthood among Brexiters. He reportedly postponed a surgery to join the government until the end of October, so who knows how long he’ll stick around.Cummings himself might find a short stay wholly unsatisfactory though. That would make him more like a skilled coder who follows his boss’s brief, or even just a hired gun, than the design revolutionary lionized in his writings.To contact the author of this story: Therese Raphael at traphael4@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Stephanie Baker at stebaker@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Therese Raphael writes editorials on European politics and economics for Bloomberg Opinion. She was editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal Europe.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- In the highly entertaining Channel 4 drama about the 2016 referendum campaign “Brexit: The Uncivil War,” Benedict Cumberbatch, playing the mastermind of the Vote Leave campaign, is sometimes found crouched in the narrow pantry where he retreats to think. It’s not hard to picture the real Dominic Cummings doing just that.Cummings is no mere political curiosity. Though unelected and without a seat at the cabinet table, he is U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s most important adviser. A master of the focus group and the targeted digital ad, he will play a critical role in any early election or second referendum on Brexit.The Johnson-Cummings pairing could be largely a matter of short-term expedience. Johnson wants a proven hand to carry out his “do or die” Oct. 31 Brexit pledge and win an election. But it could also be about something beyond Brexit. At the heart of the new government are two ambitious men possessed by a sense of history, some would say grandiosity, and an appetite for taking big gambles.For Cummings, Brexit is a means to a greater end: a complete overhaul of the machinery of government. This might have been started long ago, but Margaret Thatcher, that icon of the British right, didn’t go far enough in Cummings’s view. She shied away from reforming the civil service, whose inefficiencies Cummings finds maddening. He wants to finish the job he started with Vote Leave by using insights from the world of computing, physics, warfare and sport. If he stays beyond Brexit, Cummings will have to prove his ideas aren’t some utopian vision.But there’s a paradox: The political upheaval caused by Brexit may have opened the door to change, but the chaos of a no-deal Brexit could make the very reforms he seeks impossible to implement.No Ordinary BrexiterCummings cannot be confused with your garden variety no-deal Brexiter. He notes in one of his many, lengthy blog posts that he is “not a Tory libertarian, ‘populist,’ or anything else.” That explains his deep disdain for the “narcissist-delusional” group of hard-core Brexiters in the party. For them, leaving the EU is an ideological necessity and a mark of tribal loyalty. He isn’t one of that tribe, or any tribe. He even went so far, in a twitter exchange in 2017, as to say the referendum may have been a mistake.Most political advisers operate in the shadows, but Cummings is the subject of an endless stream of profiles; in a country that worships eccentricity, he is a journalistic gift that keeps on giving. He also invites inspection. His wide-ranging, occasionally breathless writings provide a dizzying tour of the innovators, historical figures, athletes and scientists who have informed his thinking. His political philosophy incorporates insights from Prussian Otto von Bismarck, interface design wizard Bret Victor, physicist and computer scientist Michael Nielsen, T.S. Eliot and many more.To imagine a Cummings-led takeover of the British state, visualize a room resembling a NASA launch control center in which Bismarck is huddled with, say, a crack team of designers and coders on loan from Apple. Bismarck, the “blood and iron” chancellor who distrusted democracy, is important. Cummings also singles out for praise the Chinese Communist Party for its “use of proven systems management techniques for integrating principles of effective action to predict and manage complex systems at large scale.”For the cadres of civil servants orbiting Downing Street, some might find Cummings’s own verdict of their world makes for uncomfortable reading:Critical institutions (including the senior civil service and the parties) are programmed to fight to stay dysfunctional, they fight to stay closed and avoid learning about high performance, they fight to exclude the most able people.His writings reveal strong views on education reform (he has written controversially that policy-makers too easily discount the role of genetics in achievement), immigration (doesn’t like the low-skilled type) and European agricultural subsidies (thinks them absurd although apparently a farm he co-owns benefits handsomely from them).We don’t know much about what he thinks is the right fiscal policy in an ultra-low interest rate borderline recessionary environment. He’s said little about whether U.S.-style regulations necessary for a trade agreement are an acceptable substitute for EU-style rules.OODA Loop Indeed, policy specifics seem less important to Cummings than design problems and engineering effective decision-making systems in government. He’s a big fan of the OODA loop, the decision-making cycle developed by the late military strategist and Air Force fighter pilot John Boyd. The sequence – observe, orient, design and act – enables the practitioner, originally fighter pilots, to stay one step ahead of their opponents, constantly taking in new information and using it.Doing the OODA loop well requires clear-eyed awareness of your own blind spots, something Cummings sometimes seems to lack. In his blogging days, he would occasionally respond to reader comments. But when readers questioned whether his views smacked of utopianism, or asked for a few examples of where changes he proposes had been road-tested in government, he didn’t reply.He cannot, however, be accused of thinking small. Think of him as a cross between Steve Bannon and Dick Cheney. Cummings would like to harness the extreme preparation and concentration of people like solo free climber Alex Honnold. This ideal of the super-athlete civil servant feeds into his view that selection for politics and government should be like winnowing the great from the also-rans in music or sport. That sounds appealing, but of course the French train up an uber-elite for government roles and still wound up with the gilets jaunes and stubbornly high levels of unemployment.  Held in contempt of parliament earlier this year, he appears bent on undermining elected lawmakers by persuading his boss to ignore constitutional convention in pursuing a no-deal Brexit. He is not one to sacrifice his agenda on the altar of careerism either. Indeed, former Prime Minister David Cameron once called him a “career psychopath.” So as long as Cummings is around, it’s fair to say that the Johnson Plan is the Cummings Plan.Homer Simpson MomentHis opponents, particularly on the left, paint him as self-important, hypocritical and a caricature of the mad genius rather than the real thing. After former Attorney General and anti-Brexit lawmaker Dominic Grieve said he was arrogant and didn’t understand the British constitution, Cummings snidely replied, “Mr. Grieve, we’ll see what he’s right about.” “Not since Homer Simpson sat on a sofa trying to get to grips with the mystery of his own obesity while simultaneously eating donuts, can any TV viewing audience have had irony spoon-fed to them with such generous ease,” wrote the Independent’s Tom Peck.The bigger Homerian irony is Brexit itself. Cummings’s entire theory of remaking government is based on the criticism that, as he put it, “most of everybody’s day is spent just battling entropy – it is not pursuing priorities and building valuable things.” What exactly does he think people’s days will be spent doing when they confront tariffs and new regulatory barriers to trade? When they spend time and money duplicating EU bureaucracies or finding new sources of funding for scientific programs? Entropy indeed.If not an ideologue, he is at least an idealist and they can easily flame out once in power. His very critique of the hierarchical, fixed mind-set machinery of government suggests he would find the plodding experience of overhauling a bureaucracy, as opposed to the adrenaline rush of directing a referendum or election campaign, highly frustrating if he got the chance. The civil servants he wants to turn into decision-making Olympians may not play along. It’s not enough for revolutionaries to have vision, they also need charisma.Known for his brash style, Cummings doesn’t hold back on those he deems lesser beings, once referring to David Davis, the former Brexit secretary, as “thick as mince, lazy as a toad and vain as Narcissus.” (Davis didn’t make it into Johnson’s cabinet.) As reports filter out of special advisers being fired without warning, one wonders whether he’ll inspire enough loyalty to carry through his grander plans.For now, though, it’s Johnson’s confidence that gives Cummings’s ideas wings. If he helps deliver Brexit and win an election that will no doubt secure him a sainthood among Brexiters. He reportedly postponed a surgery to join the government until the end of October, so who knows how long he’ll stick around.Cummings himself might find a short stay wholly unsatisfactory though. That would make him more like a skilled coder who follows his boss’s brief, or even just a hired gun, than the design revolutionary lionized in his writings.To contact the author of this story: Therese Raphael at traphael4@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Stephanie Baker at stebaker@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Therese Raphael writes editorials on European politics and economics for Bloomberg Opinion. She was editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal Europe.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

August 16, 2019 at 09:00AM via IFTTT

[celticnoise]

On 25 May this year, on the anniversary of the greatest triumph in the history of the club, and with another historic accomplishment just completed, even as the supporters were celebrating that fact, the Celtic board offered Neil Lennon, our interim boss, a man who took the job after the resignation of Brendan Rodgers, the full time post as manager.

They did it in the Hampden shower room.

It was a choice that even Lennon’s supporters must admit was controversial. There is no way of knowing how much of the support was in favour of that decision, but that there was a large and vocal section of the fan base that was wholeheartedly opposed to it cannot be denied.

In response, I penned a furious article, one of the angriest I’ve ever written, at a time when I should have been toasting the most successful Scottish team in generations.

I was angry in part because I did not support the decision, but I was angrier, by far, with the cynical timing of the announcement and the way it was made. It was exploitative. It was designed to fall at a time when the board knew the angry voices would be drowned out by fans who did not want the occasion ruined, as though we were the ones who’d ruined it.

Lawwell and his board knew it would drive a wedge between those who supported the appointment and those who did not.

In the days that followed, myself and others had to read all manner of nonsense about how we were behaving like “enemies within.”

I blame Lawwell and the board for that response; they had counted on it.

In the mind-bending press conference that followed, Peter Lawwell openly boasted about how he had never even considered other candidates for the job.

The man who sits at the apex of the football operation and who is paid the highest salary at the club didn’t even look at their CV’s.

It was, and it remains, the single greatest act of gross irresponsibility and corporate failure that I have seen at Celtic since the era of the Kelly’s and Whites, and it came at the end of a season in which Lawwell’s ego had clashed dramatically with that of the hugely successful Rodgers and fed into the situation that saw him depart the club with the season half done.

Last night, Lawwell’s shabby decision making resulted in the potential loss of tens of millions of pounds.

Neil Lennon carries the can for the performance, but he didn’t appoint himself. He was chosen above all the other managers out there, for all his flaws – and they are legion – by men who had made their minds up and used the Scottish Cup as their validation.

We will never know how they would have justified it and sold it to us had we lost that day.

Frankly it’s a question I never troubled myself with, because in spite of them 3Treble was a triumph I never wanted further sullied with speculative scenarios and talk of what might have been.

Looking back on it now, I don’t even think they’d have tried. They’d have appointed him – of that there is absolutely no doubt – and we’d have been expected to wear it, whether we liked it or not. That they hold the fans in contempt has never really been up for debate, not since the chairman accused some of us of racism for daring to question whether or not we should have a man like Ian Livingstone on the board, a Tory peer who had voted for austerity.

(He is Jewish, and although nobody but a very few internet goons knew that, far less cared, far less brought it up Ian Bankier shamefully accused those who criticised him of being motivated by antisemitism instead of his right wing politics and the way he had used his position of influence to inflict hardship on people who were already struggling.)

Bankier’s scandalous remarks came in front of shareholders at the club’s AGM.

It should have been his last.

That he survived that is outrageous, but it is no more outrageous than the never ending story of Peter Lawwell, the highest paid person in Scottish football, who has been at Celtic for seventeen years. It is almost unheard of, in any industry in the modern age.

In Price Waterhouse Cooper’s 2017 Global Strategy document, they pointed out that the average “shelf life” for a chief executive or senior operating manager in the leading 2500 companies traded on the NYSE is five years.

After that, things get stale.

Strategies start to repeat themselves.

A company is like a football team; it needs an overhaul after a while.

Peter Lawwell has been at Celtic through the reigns of six different managers and seven managerial tenures. He is the only senior official at Celtic to have appointed the same man to that post twice. His appointments have had varying degrees of success.

O’Neill, Strachan, Mowbray, Lennon, Deila and Rodgers have all worked at Celtic under him. Five years into his tenure, his failure to properly fund Strachan’s final transfer window cost us a league title and the manager left soon afterwards.

He appointed Mowbray who was a disaster and lasted less than a season.

He appointed Lennon as interim boss and then gave him the job despite the manager having exactly zero experience and that cost us another league championship. He refused to take any responsibility for those things. He never even considered his position.

The best thing that ever happened to Lawwell at Celtic happened at Ibrox, and there is a widespread belief that he may even have mishandled that.

Lennon had a free run at the league for several years, and when he left – tired of the restraints our board had imposed on him – we appointed, as his replacement, the man Lawwell had originally intended to come in and work as the assistant manager.

The chickens came home to roost on 17 April 2016, when the NewCo knocked us out of the Scottish Cup and the board was forced to accept that the Deila experiment hadn’t worked and that the club had gone backwards as a result.

Lawwell has always been a lucky man though, and for once our board acted decisively and they appointed the best manager they could find in Brendan Rodgers. Two trebles and two successive Champions League group stage qualifications followed.

And then Lawwell decided to grab a grenade, pull out the pin, and roll it under the manager’s desk.

There was wrong on both sides, but when the CEO authorised a public attack on Brendan Rodgers via the BBC he didn’t wait until a crucial Champions League qualifier was in the rear-view. He did it on the night of the game.

There was no going back from that.

Peter Lawwell has been the beneficiary of nearly a decade of self-inflicted damage at Ibrox.

But for that spell, we have no way of knowing where we’d be and what his record would look like, but the failures of Strachan’s last season, the Mowbray disaster and the decision to appoint an untried managerial rookie in his place do not suggest it would have gone well.

That he has repeated the same mistake in appointing Lennon again, a man whose post-Celtic Park record was the sack at Bolton and “mutual consenting” at Easter Road hammers home the message that this guy is either shockingly complacent or someone who learns nothing.

Lawwell is out of ideas, and that’s been evident for years now.

For all that, he is trusted to make these decisions by a board that is all but invisible and which is wholly unaccountable to the fans. Who are the people who run Celtic? Do they do so on a daily basis? No, they have other interests outside the club.

They show up on match days, they hob-nob in their executive dining room and then go off to their real jobs again.

The most visible, other than Lawwell, is Dermot Desmond, of course. He is widely regarded as the true decision maker at the club, which is an absurdity as he is merely the largest shareholder and has never shown the slightest interest in even being chairman.

But the rest of the board are viewed – probably rightly – as nodding donkeys doing his bidding.

For all the alleged “professionalism” at our club, it is a bizarre way to run a business with a £100 million turnover.

It is a shocking way to run a football team.

There is a vacuum at Celtic where power should be, and nature abhors a vacuum and Lawwell has moved to fill it.

His fingerprints are all over that disaster last night, from the Lennon appointment itself to the club’s abject transfer policy which they jokingly refer to as “risk averse” but which has probably cost us a nine figure sum in the last ten years based on failures to reach the Champions League groups, even when the path ahead of us seemed free of danger.

The last four teams to knock us out have not been amongst the great sides of Europe; their names, for posterity, are Maribor, Malmo, AEK Athens and Cluj.

Maribor, in 2014, finished bottom of their Champions League group with 3 points. The year after it, Malmo finished in the same position with the same points in their group. Last season, AEK Athens got there ahead of us and didn’t win a single point. If Cluj even get there at all I will be very, very surprised. They are probably the least impressive side out of the four of them. It is not ridiculous to suggest that these were beatable teams.

But in 2014 we failed to strengthen properly prior to the Legia Warsaw matches – our signings were Craig Gordon on a free and Jo Inge Berget on loan – and were destroyed over the two legs only for UEFA to grant us a reprieve.

What did we do with that reprieve? We sold Fraser Forster for £10 million and brought in Denayer and Tonev on loan.

We spent not one extra penny.

We failed utterly to maximise our chances and we paid the ultimate price for that with a double humiliation.

The following season, we nickel and dimed our transfer business with a permanent deal for loanee Denayer for £1.5 million, Saidy Janko, Logan Bailly on frees and a loan deal for Man Utd youth Tyler Blackett (remember those guys, eah?). Oh yeah, and we got the manager’s “first choice” signing, Nadir Ciftci from Dundee United and, inexplicably, Scott Allan.

After we’d crashed out of Europe’s premier competition we recouped all that cash and more when we punted Virgil Van Dijk and replaced him with Jozo Simunovic. We also bought Ryan Christie, but sent him back to Inverness on loan.

This is what “preparing us for Europe” looks like at Celtic Park, and that it has so often resulted in utter failure should hardly be a surprise.

We repeat this nonsense year after year, and in the campaign of 2013-14, where James Forrest struck late at home to knock out Karagandy, we had walked the fine line by perversely weakening the team prior to every round in the Champions League qualifiers.

Wanyama was sold before Cliftonville. We sold Gary Hooper prior to the qualifier against Elfsborg. Coming out of that game – just two days after the away leg – and with the Ukrainian’s on the horizon, Neil Lennon was forced to let go of Kelvin Wilson.

On the night of the home tie, which we won 3-0, there was not a single new player from those who had completed the previous season in our starting eleven; Amido Balde, Virgil Van Dijk, Steven Mouyokolo and Derk Boerrigter were all absent for one reason or another.

That we were damned lucky to go through hardly needed pointing out.

We learned so many lessons from that, of course, that Maribor followed the next year and Malmo after that. None of that had to happen. None of those defeats were necessary.

Of course, fans barely need reminding of how we “prepared” for Europe last time around, with the Athens game coming slap bang in the middle of the manager’s dummy spitting and the farcical saga of John McGinn having just days before.

Prior to that one, we had made just four signings, and two of those were permanent deals for players who had been at the club the year before. We had re-signed Emilio Izzaguire on a short term deal, and an Australian youth on loan who had never played a senior club match in his life.

When asked about that, the manager made it clear that he had no idea who the player was.

Last season’s summer was a calamity which in any other industry would have cost the CEO his job, and it was exacerbated by his public falling out with the manager which led to months of uncertainty and behind the scenes chaos.

Before the window shut – after it was too late to matter – we showed the full scope of our ambitions and intent when we brought in a Leicester City reserve on loan, an Arsenal youth player and signed Youssouf Mulumbu on a free after he’d been available for months.

Our Champions League failure was offset by the sale of Moussa Dembele shortly before the window closed, and too late for us to sign a replacement.

January came, and we brought in more loanees and haggled over a few hundred grand for a striker who has yet to hit the ground. We signed a Ukrainian winger the manager said he didn’t want and who we promptly let go back to his club for six months.

And then the manager quit, in February, and we pretended to be surprised.

We hired Lennon on an interim basis, watched as we squeaked our way through crucial league games and lost at Ibrox, and with fans expecting a proper Rodgers replacement we offered him the job in the shower room after a cup final win which was greeted as much with relief as satisfaction.

None of this has been the result of events beyond our control, which is to say none of these were things forced on us by external factors. These setbacks are the results of far-reaching decisions which have been taken inside our club.

They are the results of the choices we’ve made; of the policies we’ve decided to follow.

This is the strategy. This is the plan.

Of course, that is a little speculative because nobody at Celtic Park thinks explaining the strategy to us is worth the time or trouble. The commercial side of the club works overtime, to bring in as much money from us as possible.

But nobody ever explains the correlation between that and these grinding failures to strengthen the squad.

The board treats the fans like mugs.

They see us purely as customers, fools to be sold cheap tat and horrible third strips.

They have no respect for our views, and this is revealed time and time again. The contempt with which people inside the club have for the support is clearly expressed whenever they talk about social media, which they profess not to care about.

Yet Twitter, Facebook, the blogs and the forums are the only ways the fans have to make themselves heard.

No wonder the board and the manager disdain them.

This is a board that has no lines of communication with the supporters and who don’t want any.

The AGM is a farcical affair where they make decisions by diktat knowing there aren’t enough votes in the room to oppose a single one.

To cap it off, the main fan organisations are specifically prohibited, by their own constitutions, from criticising the club or the strategy in any way, shape or form.

When I tell people this they flatly refuse to believe it, but it’s true nonetheless.

And we laugh at the Ibrox fans and their pliability.

The club has other policies which neuter fans, and not all of them are obvious but one should be.

The “home ticket scheme” locks fans into buying Europa League tickets if they want to qualify for cup semis and finals.

It is a form of blackmail, and it is the only thing that guarantees that group stage games in that second rate tournament won’t take place in front of empty stands. Celtic supporter’s buses should withdraw from it en masse, but the Association will continue to support it even though it is a means of keeping everyone in line.

There is no stomach for a fight there.

I know a dozen people who’ve already said the idea of attending Thursday night matches in that second tier tournament holds no appeal. But they’ll be there, and they admit it, because they might miss out on Hampden tickets later on. That too might be a gamble with no upside.

You have to get to Hampden to need tickets for it, and nothing should be taken for granted.

Empty seats are the only language that this board understands or will respond to, and that was proved in Deila’s second season when they European games were played in front of closed upper tiers. That focussed minds, and Brendan Rodgers was the response we got.

Celtic fans need to take some responsibility here.

Only they can change this.

Real questions should have been asked this time last year when we endured a calamitous summer that put the manager on the brink of walking.

Somehow the people in charge escaped the scrutiny.

Lennon’s appointment was another chance to put them under pressure and make them explain the long term plan. But the Lennon fan club had its day and all talk of asking such questions was swept aside.

This board is not interested in serving us, only serving itself.

There is no long term strategy here that anyone can accurately identify. The people in charge of our club are hiding behind the domestic successes secured by Rodgers and Lennon, who inherited his team and played with his tactics for the latter part of that campaign.

Beyond simply winning this year’s title, I couldn’t tell you what they regard as good enough. The appointment of Lennon looked like, was, and has proved to be, a colossal backward step in terms of our European reputation and standing.

Do not expect explanations. Do not expect a detailed run-down on where they see us going from here.

An organisation stuck in the mud as we are would conduct a full-scale strategic review, and the starting point would be whether or not the CEO can still justify his salary.

This board appointed a third tier manager this summer, and I said at the time that right there you could judge their vision and their ambitions for this club.

Last night came as no shock as awful as it was. Is this good enough for most supporters?

It must be or there would be some attempt to change it.

Our Association will not rock the boat. Our shareholders organisation has sat in mute silence on our strategy for years now.

I criticise Club 1872, but their members have balls … they fight for something. Our own shareholders group is too busy playing politics; what damned good does that do us as a footabll club? Where is their focus on the things that matter to the fans?

I know how this ends.

We’re going to be told to sit on our frustration and “get behind the team for the next game.”

It is ever thus, and that’s how we’ve ended up here.

The board treats us with contempt because we deserve it.

They are unaccountable because we will not hold them to account, and even now there’s no real will to do it.

I sometimes wonder what it will take.

And I worry that we might be about to find out.

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