Would You Credit It?

We are told that the United Kingdom might lose its AAA credit rating.

What, again?

George Osborne has already done that once.

We Are The Mainstream Now

Don't get your hopes up for anything more than legislation technically taking us out of the EU, but continuing to apply each and every EU law in the absence of a specific Commons resolution that only a Minister could propose.

The point, however, is that opinions from outside the neoliberal and neoconservative "centre ground" are now part of the mainstream. Indeed, they now are the mainstream.

Fried Union Rings?

The people of Scotland still wouldn't vote for independence.

Nor would the people of either state in Ireland vote for unification on any specific terms that might realistically be proposed.

Calm down.

Damaged Goods

Don't let this one slip under the radar. Heather Stewart writes:

The defence secretary, Michael Fallon, has agreed to pay damages to an imam after repeating false claims that he was a supporter of Islamic State.

Suliman Gani found himself at the centre of a storm during the recent London mayoral election campaign when senior Conservatives including the prime minister questioned the judgment of the Labour candidate, Sadiq Khan, for sharing a platform with him nine times.

David Cameron even suggested in the House of Commons that Gani supported Isis – something the imam fervently denied. 

After Fallon made a similar claim in a BBC interview on 7 May – where, unlike Cameron in the Commons, he was not covered by parliamentary privilege – Gani began legal action. 

Fallon withdrew the claim and apologised, as did the prime minister. But Gani pressed ahead with the case, and it has emerged that it was settled last Friday. 

Fallon agreed to pay compensation and legal costs, thought to amount to several thousand pounds. 

In a statement published on his website, Fallon said: “I accept that you are entirely opposed to Daesh/Islamic State, that you regard it as incompatible with your religious and moral beliefs, and that you have spoken out publicly against it. 

“I repeat my apology for the error that I made and for the distress that it caused to you and your family.

“In recognition of that distress I have agreed to make a payment of compensation and to meet your reasonable legal costs.”

After the politicians made the claims, Gani told LBC radio that he feared for his life as well as those of his family and children. 

He said he was “deeply shocked and greatly disheartened” that Fallon had made the comments about him “without any shred of evidence”. 

A spokesman for Fallon said he had repeated the claims about Gani only because he had heard them being made by the journalist Andrew Neil on the BBC. 

Neil subsequently withdrew them.

Fallon was “mortified” when he realised the mistake, his spokesman said. 

Khan won the mayoral election, and his Tory opponent Zac Goldsmith’s campaign was criticised even by senior Conservatives for being divisive. 

Despite the prime minister’s attempts to bracket him with extremists, Khan has since shared a platform with Cameron as part of the cross-party Stronger In campaign in the EU referendum.

"The Durham Miners Would Never Wear It"

Those were the words that the British Government of the late 1940s wrote across the plans for the EU's first precursor, before duly sending them back.

That was that.

"The Durham Miners would never wear it." So the United Kingdom's answer was no.

That meant the Durham Miners' Association, with its vast network of national and international contacts.

But it also meant the miners themselves, who were the basis of that Association's wealth and power.

Today, we learned that last year, for the first time on record, more people died in the North East of England than were born here.

Get out and vote.

Jo-king Apart

The canonisation of Jo Cox, of whom even Nick Robinson had to admit on the day after her death that he had never previously heard, is sashaying effortlessly into the coronation of her widower.

Under ordinary circumstances, Brendan Cox would fail the vetting to become a Labour parliamentary by-election candidate.

Take a look at the circumstances of his departure from the employ of Save the Children.

It is laughable to suggest that his late wife might have gone on to become Foreign Secretary.

The present Shadow Foreign Secretary is out of step enough with the present Leader and with the present membership.

But even Hilary Benn did not nominate Jeremy Corbyn and then recant, after Corbyn had been elected with three fifths of the first preference vote.

Talk about a bad career move. Insofar as she ever had a political career.

It is quite likely that in 2020, Jo Cox would have re-joined her husband in the Clintonian world of the big NGOs.

At their level of that world, the pay is almost incomparably better than that of a perpetual backbench MP.

That level of that world also conducts its own foreign policy, often via tame Foreign Ministries such as our own.

Hence the presence at today's proceedings of the utterly unscrutinised Malala Yousafzai.

Does everyone where she comes from speak English like that? Was she chosen at random to be given a BBC Urdu blog at the age of 11? (Eleven, brothers and sisters. Eleven.)

If, like numerous of her peers, she had been killed by a drone, then we should never have heard of her.

And hence the fact that, in having raised well over a million pounds, the Jo Cox Fund has raised well over £300,000 for the White Helmets in Syria.

While the money continues to roll in, is that even legal? If it is, then it ought not to be.

As much as anything else, the suggestion that that organisation is funded by the British public constitutes a grave threat to the security of the British public.

Absolutely no one stood up in Parliament on Monday and raised this very serious matter. Never had the place looked more like a club for the sole benefit of its members.

Jack Buckby's intervention means that there will certainly be a contested by-election at Batley and Spen.

There needs to be a candidate without 20 years of a too perfectly polished Blairite CV.

There needs to be a candidate who is opposed to austerity and to wars of choice, never mind to wars of choice in a time of austerity.

Ideally, that ought to be the Labour candidate.

But if it needs to be someone else, then so be it.

Brexit Is Not The Property of The Political Right

Chris Bickerton writes: 

“Chris, with all my respect and admiration, please explain to me how you have found yourself on this same side as these people. I just don’t understand.” 

This was the message I received via Twitter last weekend, from a Spanish friend living in Madrid. 

He also sent me a link to an article in a Spanish newspaper entitled “Hitler was right”, a quote attributed to a 13-year-old Nigel Farage who – according to an old schoolmate – would berate and taunt his Jewish classmates with these sorts of statements. 

I teach politics at the University of Cambridge and have been researching the EU for more than a decade. I have just published a book, The European Union: A Citizen’s Guide, which explains what the EU is and what it does, without all the jargon and endless lists of treaties. 

I am what we think of as an “EU expert”. 

But in contrast to virtually all my colleagues, and all of my neighbours as far as I can tell, I will be voting for Brexit. 

In Spain, and in much of Europe, people have a fixed idea of Brexiters: small-minded nationalists, hostile to immigration, reckless and irresponsible. 

The pro-EU group set up by the former Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, made this point as clearly as anyone. 

One of its campaign posters read: “If people like Rupert Murdoch, Nigel Farage, George Galloway, Nick Griffin and Marine Le Pen want Britain to leave the EU, where does that put you?”

This is the view of my Spanish friend and so let me answer him. 

Brexit is not the property of the political right. 

In 1975, in the UK’s first referendum on Europe, one of the ironies of the vote was that the internationalist left was far more solidly against the common market than the typically more chauvinistic and nationalistic right. 

Middle-class intellectuals who believed in socialism happily voted to leave, with no sense of being social pariahs. 

This is a pretty accurate description of many of my neighbours in Cambridge, who voted to leave in 1975 and will vote to remain tomorrow. 

The fact that the loudest leave voices are those of rightwing politicians tells us much more about the trajectory taken by the British left than it does about Brexit itself. 

Demoralised by Margaret Thatcher’s electoral supremacy in the 1980s, the British Labour party turned towards both European integration and human rights as new sources of intellectual inspiration and authority. 

The party slowly gave up its traditional support for parliamentary sovereignty and replaced it with a more liberal understanding of rights, where constitutional constraints are accepted as legitimate and necessary. 

Many other leftwing parties in Europe – such as the French socialists and the Italian communists – did the same. 

I believe this was a Faustian pact. 

The left traded its commitment to the supremacy of the ballot box for a more nebulous idea of “locking in” good policies through EU laws. 

The result has been to give up to the likes of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove the language of democracy and popular sovereignty. 

I refuse to do this. 

The only guarantee for the policies that we want is to win majorities for them through national elections. There is always the danger of losing the argument but that’s democracy. 

Is it irresponsible to vote for Brexit? 

Only if you believe that around 50% of Britons are foreigner-hating hooligans. 

A UK exit from the EU would reveal how little of our politics is determined by what goes on in Brussels. 

Take immigration. I don’t believe immigration numbers will fall after Brexit. 

High rates of immigration into Britain are driven by a British growth model that favours expanding the labour force in place of more intensive forms of growth aimed at boosting productivity. 

Were the UK to leave the EU, this growth model would persist though the origins of immigrants may change.

The crucial difference is that politicians could no longer blame high rates of immigration on the EU. 

We would have to confront it as being at the centre of the British economic model and decide whether this is a model we want to keep. 

There is a world of difference between thinking of immigration as something foisted on to the UK by distant Brussels bureaucrats or as the result of a choice about how this country grows and creates wealth. 

The latter can only come with Brexit. 

A final word to my Spanish friend: this referendum is not a quaintly British affair. 

A key theme has been the deep disenchantment voters feel about politics and the contempt they have for politicians, and there is nothing uniquely British about this. 

Disenchantment with politics is everywhere in Europe: from Podemos’s attack on la casta in Spain to the successes of the Five Star Movement in Italy. 

It unites east with west, and north with south. 

The British EU referendum is the tip of a much larger iceberg, a European union of disenchantment.

I believe we can make this into the basis for a new internationalism in Europe, one that gives Europe a political meaning far more profound than the shallow cosmopolitanism that comes with the economic integration of the single market.

A vote for Brexit is also a universal message to all other Europeans that politics can be about change and not just about defending the status quo.