Our free and fearless press is today trying to move on to other news, to gloss over the shortcomings already apparent, but for those still inhabiting the real world, it is becoming increasingly clear that the much-vaunted Brexit deal hailed as a triumph for alleged Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is nothing of the sort.
Yesterday, in the UK at least, the sycophancy was off the scale. The
Daily Mail led the orgy of crawling, proclaiming “
GET READY FOR BLAST OFF, BRITAIN! UK gears up for business boom with Brexit deal done … PM urges all MPs to back him as it’s right thing to do … THE Economy will bounce back in 2021 helped by the post-Brexit trade deal, experts said last night”. This was claimed to be “
unrivalled news” coverage.
Which, not for the first time with the inmates of the Northcliffe House bunker, it was not. Nor was the equally sycophantic outpouring from the Murdoch
Times, which told readers of “A new special relationship … Gove claims Brexit deal is fresh start for Britain after years of ‘ugly politics’”. Ugly politics, much of which has seen Michael “
Oiky” Gove intimately involved. And no-one should take one word he utters on trust.
Not to be outdone in this crawling contest, the
Daily Brexit, still called the
Express, told its dwindling audience “
Victory in Brexit trade deal will help UK emerge as leading economic powerhouse … BORIS HERALDS OUR NEW ‘GOLDEN AGE’”. But then came a bursting of the balloon, as the European Commission revealed just what the UK really won.
And the scorecard made for grim reading: the return of border checks, the return of roaming charges, no more frictionless trade, no full participation in the “
Open Skies” policy, and worst of all, no automatic recognition of professional qualifications by the EU, topped with an end to financial services passporting. Which will screw over the City of London.
As to the claims that the UK had averted the possibility of retaliatory tariff applications by the EU, Richard Murphy had bad news. “
I am most amused to read some of the detail of the Brexit agreement. In particular in the level playing field section I do note that the UK won out against ‘retaliatory arrangements’ on divergence. There are ‘rebalancing measures’ instead, which read very much like tariffs to me”. And there is more.
While UK-based media has spun for its supper, that outside the country is under no such obligation, and especially not the
New York Times, which noted the loss of financial services passporting, commenting “
That loss is especially painful for Britain, which ran a surplus of £18 billion, or $24 billion, on trade in financial and other services with the European Union in 2019, but a deficit of £97 billion, or $129 billion, on trade in goods”.
Do go on. “
‘The result of the deal is that the European Union retains all of its current advantages in trading, particularly with goods, and the UK loses all of its current advantages in the trade for services,’ says Tom Kibasi, the former director of the Institute for Public Policy research, a research institute. ‘The outcome of this trade negotiation is precisely what happens with most trade deals: the larger party gets what it wants and the smaller party rolls over’”. The smaller party being the UK.
Already, fishermen’s leaders are talking of betrayal, of Bozo caving in to the EU. There will be more in the same vein. The mixture of spin and downright lying peddled by the press - typified by the
Mail claiming that Michel Barnier had been “
Sidelined” and Bozo had negotiated directly with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen - is about to be exposed as a sham, as is the alleged skill of the UK ’s negotiators.
David Frost, presented as a brilliant negotiator by the
Mail, was mismatched and outclassed. The “
EU climbdown” was no such thing. The UK has been rolled over and the rest of the world is laughing at our delusion and ignorance.
The press is happy. But its bosses won’t be losing their jobs.
I’ll just leave that one there.
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8 comments:
Thing is, it doesn't really matter to Johnson and the Tories. They got a deal- however awful it may be - when the naysayers said they wouldn't. That's a win for them.
The country got a taste of no deal on a small scale in Kent. That will rein the headbangers in and get the ERG on side. Better a gradual decline than a sudden collapse. Another win.
Yes, it's "winning" against truly awful alternatives, but there is no time left for plan B. Very Johnsonian. Sadly, I think enough people will accept it.
So the usual vomit of corporate media lies, cowardice and hypocrisy. All of it peddled by the usual bought-and-paid-for propaganda clerks.
Swallowed by a nation of too many mugs.
"21/12/2020 STEPHEN GLOVER: Boris Johnson has betrayed us at Christmas... he won't be forgiven"
That didn't age well. A week is a long tìme in politics. Neve mind. When the whole of the UK goes into Tier 4 and Kent becomes a permanent lorry park next week, he'll be a useless tosser with a crap hairdo again
The thing is that most people still get their 'news' from those same totally (and willingly) embedded media; not just the tax-dodger-owned papers but from broadcast stenographers like Kuenssberg and Peston. So, unless it directly impacts upon them personally, and impacts them in one go rather than gradually over a period of months or years, a large proportion of the population will continue to think that this mess was 'a good deal'. Minimal bunting will be required to gloss over it.
And then, when the disaster finally does impinge upon even the densest of them in any substantial way, they can easily be distracted by a royal event or two, a scandal involving a television game show, or just by that classic British misdirection, "It's all der fault of dem nasty forrners, always tryin' to do us down! Waah!"
And - depressingly - it will work. It always has worked. "We have always been at war with Europe".
British state propaganda at it's finest.
One now has to wonder if this new deadly strain (or stain) "Bojo-10" was all cooked up to close the borders for a few days, and to help facilitate the capitulation of UK, and to save face accepting this worse deal, yet still look like heros.
The ultimate dead cat from classic Dom, now working on the side, from his bunker up in Durham.
Also soon to receive a Lordship and PPE contract for his sterling work creating a spivs paradise.
Being transformed into a service economy was the worst thing to have happened to Britain, which resulted in the country going downhill and its people dumber, just as Carl Sagan predicted (applies to UK just as well):
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”
FUBAR
I still smell shoite this deal sucks on so many levels.
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