Monday 26 September 2016

Remainers still pro-EU...3 months on





I guess it is hard to expect any different from the FT, but today's headline of how worried the City are (in reality it is an ex-bank CEO who is now a spinner for  The CityUK) is very unbalanced.


Big banks, especially US ones, are worried. They are worried because they do not like change to the status quo which has them as top dogs an unchallengeable. For the US, the Trump factor also means that they do not want to have more political uncertainty than they have to.


The UK though is very divided, this one of the worst points to come out of the referendum. For a long time in the future the country will be split on Leave/Remain terms, with the accompanying Shires vs Cities and Liberal vs Conservative split. (I find it so weird the political parties have not realigned themselves with voters here, but perhaps with time).


Also intriguing though is the threat of 'Hard' Brexit and yet this always seemed the most likely outcome given EU intransigence and the sheer difficulty of trying to negotiate a deal within 2 years. Hard Brexit will be a shock, but of course it will be much worse for the EU than the UK (given trade flows). Thus the UK will continue or even increase its role as a safe haven, untied from European travails which run aplenty.


The big downside to the Remoaning is that no other views appear. KPMG has released a study today saying all CEO's are looking at moving business...all the PR guns are lined up to remaon just as they were lined up for remain. This talking the country down piece is frustrating as it makes a difficult situation worse than it needs to be and stops the brightest and best form coming up with the solutions required - so focussed are they on spinning for remoan.

19 comments:

Steven_L said...

They haven't given up yet. The 'mass coordinated threat to leave the UK' is coming. But they'll wait until after the US election before they really get started.

Sackerson said...

Had it not been for Project Fear and the tragic murder of Jo Cox I think the Leave margin might have been much wider.

Paul Robson said...

Since the vote Jo Cox seems to have gone from being the second coming to nothing .... overnight

Sackerson said...

Don't know what you're saying, PR, except there'll have to be media restraint until the court case is over.

Raedwald said...

If KPMG, PwC, Crapita or any other gloomy naysayers and remoaners expect to do-down the nation and still pick up government contracts in two years they're away with the fairies.

They might as well pack up and fuck off now, because unless they support our country's well being there's no future for them here.

Anonymous said...

@Raedwald - they'll always have a future. They're too embedded with the parties, Whitehall itself and the public sector. They've been very successful parasites and evolved into the pinnacle/nadir of corporatist beasts.

All three could proudly announce the entire nation comprised of shit-eating kiddie fiddlers, started fresh arms that physically mugged grannies and released the footage on YouTube, and then come up with a new logo that comprised an animation of the Queen smoking crack whilst being gang-fucked by corgis. And they'd *still* get contracts galore.

Talking down the nation is small fry. They've been getting away with filching from its wallet for so long, any amount of shame they had has long since been packaged up, securitised and borrowed against.

CityUnslicker said...

anon - I am very partial to well written vitriolic comments.

Anonymous said...

For "hard Brexit" read cock-up Brexit. We may have the wish and the will to exit but do we have the skills to do it without crash landing.

Doesn't Borris look like Biggles?

andrew said...


Interesting article in the Economist on the Swiss issues with freedom of movement last week.

andrew said...

Anon

i think you may be thinking of billy bunter

CityUnslicker said...

anon - the whole point of my article was to remind everyone to try to filter out remoaner crap...you seem to have missed this hint.

Anonymous said...

anon - the whole point of my article was to remind everyone to try to filter out remoaner crap...you seem to have missed this hint.

You could always stick your fingers in your ears and pretend it might not happen. But lets leave aside the exchange of pleasantries and look at the politics of the issues.

After the "glorious" Blair years, the Conservatives failed to make a breakthrough in terms of popular support and have been in a holding pattern, first with the LimpDumps and then with the rabid right-wingers (as in winge) of UKIP. Anything to (rightly) keep their hands on power. As such they are disparate and swing one way - and then the other. The latest fad is Brexit and in traditional political terms promise a new Jerusalem.

Questioning their skills and abilities is nothing more that suggesting the Empress may not be wearing new clothes .. or any at all, though I stop short of that.

Until such times as we can see the application of some heavyweights to the task, it would be madness to assume there is a bright new horizon.

Making a judgment is not moaning even though you might wish to paint it that way.

andrew said...


BQ may be able to correct me, but I think 'heavyweights' are often only seen as heavyweights with the benefit of considerable hindsight.

Outside the PMs current and historic, who can be counted as becoming 'heavyweight' since '05?

Whatever you may think of them, the only people who spring to mind are Farage and possibly Alex Salmond.



Anonymous said...

@anon 8:18 - I think CU meant the Remoaners attempt to gain control of the narrative. They want to state "no hard Brexit" despite the fact neither side is in a position to demand, that's what the bargaining and negotiating is all about. There is definite continuation of Project Fear, fighting a rearguard action to minimise just how 'out' we go. That's a terrible bargaining position. All sides go in with a list of wants and then start trading until a compromise is found, going in with a list of things we'll trade away anything for is a horribly bad idea.

As for popular support for any party, well I'm not sure when the last time a party had a sizeable majority of the voting-age population.

We're at a curious point - we're wealthy enough to afford a political class that aren't plutocrats, but not entirely sure what to do with them, and they're not entirely sure what to do with *us*. There's just a yawning gap, where we're the necessary evil to pick which teams flag gets planted at Westminster, and they're the necessary evil to stop us having to make hard decisions.

Not a healthy state of affairs.

As for the lack of heavyweights, George Carlin's comment on American politicians may just apply to us:

"Now, there's one thing you might have noticed I don't complain about: politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: 'The Public Sucks. Fuck Hope."

Electro-Kevin said...

"The latest fad is Brexit and in traditional political terms promise a new Jerusalem." Anon @ 8.18

Well I wasn't expecting Jerusalem, just an exodus from Hell with the remains of my shirt smouldering on my back.

And "The public sucks... etc" Well I give it to you that they've been sleeping during the Blairist takeover of the West. Many thought they were voting for middling conservatism all these years but were getting nothing of the sort.

Now even moderate opinion is ruled out as extremism - to keep Blairism on track.

Dfn Blairism: the combining of Crony Capitalism with Celebrity Munificence at the expense of the striving classes, whilst making the striving classes think it's for their own good - and making them feel awful about themselves if they don't think it's for their own good.

Like CU, I enjoy your posts.

Electro-Kevin said...

As for the lack of heavyweight candidates:

Clinton represents well entrenched Blairism. Born of the sixties left it is the face of humanity and is difficult to dislodge. People sense it's wicked and corrupted but can't quite nail it to the wall - there is a spasm of rebellion = Trumpism/UKIP.

I think Clinton will make it doubly difficult for us to leave the EU. And according to Peter Hitchens this week anyone worried that Trump will lead us to World war does not properly understand the internationally interventionist Clinton.

CityUnslicker said...

Anon - Boris is Boris as is the phrase. He is there as the lightning rod as the Brexit deal will be hard fought and will need ritual sacrifice along the way.

May hates him and Fox, she brought them along to walk through the minefields in the front.

Now, whilst we can question how sensible our lot are, they are facing the likes of Hollande, Mad Merkel and Junker. Not Von Bismark and Napoleon, not even Putin.

The bar is low enough that we can succeed.

Sackerson said...

You want a touchstone example of Blairism? See Craig Murray's latest - featuring references to Baroness Amos, Sierra Leone and the Titanium Resources Group:

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2016/09/forget-blairite-propaganda-sierra-leone-not-blairs-good-war/

Lord T said...

the brightest and best coming up with solution because they are focused on remain.

If they were the brightest and best why did they fall for the false facts and many of them generated them.

The brightest and best are not the remainers.