Theresa May has become a pathetic punching bag, pummeled for one failure after another, the biggest of course being her utter messing up of the Brexit process. She leaves office ignominiously on Friday, June 7 but the British public will have one last chance to give her a raspberry when she hosts Donald Trump for a three-day state visit beginning today for which hundreds of thousands are expected to protest, including flying the Trump baby blimp.
Trump has not exactly endeared himself to the British by his gratuitous insertion into their leadership race by praising Boris Johnson for the Conservative party leadership. Johnson has made life difficult for May by undermining her at every turn and having Trump endorse him just before his visit is just another humiliation for her. Trump has also been criticizing May for the way she has handled the Brexit negotiations but she will likely swallow her pride (if she still has any left) and grovel before him and utter the usual drivel about the ‘special relationship’ between the US and the UK which, as far as I can see, involves the UK doing what the US demands in return for a pat on the head.
The comments by the US ambassador Woody Johnson that if the UK pursues a post-Brexit trade deal with the US, that would include possible privatization of the beloved National Health Service and demanding that the UK allow imports of things like chlorinated chicken has raised further alarms.
Here is how Sky News is promoting its coverage of the visit. Given that Sky is part of the Rupert Murdoch media empire, it is surprisingly less than flattering to Trump.
How seriously does the rest of the world take Trump? Well, here’s how Sky News is advertising his UK state visit. Watch. pic.twitter.com/wEa0EedoxJ
— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) June 1, 2019
Jonathan Pie gives his thoughts on these latest developments. He also says that only 37% voted in the EU elections, though initial reports had it at 50%, suggesting to him that the majority of the British public is fed up with the whole mess that their political leadership has brought them to. (Language advisory)
It’s not a co-incidence that a lot of the people and organisations behind Brexit have long records as lobbyists for pharmaceutical companies and advocates of privatising the NHS. (I have read a very detailed investigation of this, but I’m damned if I can find right now…)
Ah, here we are: Brexit was the result of a corporate lobbying campaign, which backfired.
(Interestingly, this page does not appear in DuckDuckGo’s search results at all, even if you use the exact title, despite the fact that pages which link to it do. It appears in Google’s results as the #1 hit using the exact title, and the #2 hit for “brexit corporate lobbying campaign”.)
Meh. One could make a reasonable case that Brexit was already messed, and that her mistake was taking on an impossible task.
Reginald Selkirk @3: Yeah, one does wonder what the most brilliant politician (whoever that might be) could have made of the mess Cameron left.
Dunc@#2: DDG is mostly just warmed-over Bing. Hoo-ray. Really getting sick of how everything in tech turns out to be a scam, including and especially the stuff that bills itself as being not-a-scam-unlike-all-that-other-no-really.
I think May would have been better served if she had opened up the process of finding an exit option early on, with wider consultation with all the political parties, something she tried to do only when it was too late.
May selfishly clung to power well past the point where she knew she would fail. Why is anyone feeling sorry for this helpless self-promoting plutocrat?
Because she’s a woman? It’s the only reason I can think of.
Dunc @ # 2 -- very informative; thanks!
N.B. May will only be resigning as the leader of the Conservative Party on June 7th. She will remain Prime Minister until the new leader is elected, and will only then stop being Prime Minister by tendering her resignation to the Queen. The Queen will then ask the new leader of the Conservatives to try to form a new government and become Prime Minister. For this, the new leader will still have to rely on the DUP for votes in the House of Commons.
We will waste weeks on Tory infighting and manoeuvring after June 7th. The party members will only vote when there are but two candidates left (and there are 13 standing at the moment). By the time a new government is formed it will probably be August.
This leaves just a few weeks before the deadline of averting unprecedented economic damage on the country which would otherwise happen “through automatic operation of the law”.
I doubt that the winner of the next months’ introspective infighting will have any skills to save the people, the country, or even their own party. And this person will be hailed, unironically, as “a leader”.
V19, ‘ #5; Yeah, I know, although I don’t really see how that makes it a “scam”. They seem to be on the level about not tracking you, which is why I use them.