Brexit Undefined

Brexit n

The undefined being negotiated by the unprepared in order to get the unspecified.

When I first started to print this on shirts, mugs etc way back in 2017 little did I realise just how apt the words were. Sure, we knew that the Government had no strategy, vision, plan or destination in mind but most of us assumed that there were enough adults in the Civil Service to ensure that something semi sensible would emerge and be accepted by the Government.

Oh how wrong we were!

It’s perhaps worth recalling that in 2016 one of the aims of the Leave campaign was to get “our” laws made by “our” Parliament without interference from Johnny Foreigner or any of his mates. Now we have the utterly bizarre prospect of the PM who rebelled against and resigned from Theresa May’s Tory Government throwing out 21 of his own MPs, losing his own brother from his Government, losing his first three votes in the Commons and now threatens to disobey the law made in “our” Parliament.

It’s often mentioned that “those whom the God’s wish to destroy they first make mad”. In which case the blonde buffoon and his ERG comrades are surely doomed!

We are advised that the Prime Minister of the so called “Mother of Parliaments” could ignore the first Act of Parliament passed under his Premiership. Just let that sink in for a moment. The PM could actually break the law made in exactly the circumstances he demanded in 2016.

And to cap it all he suspends Parliament in case it takes back control!

Where does this leave us? Anyone’s guess!

We will certainly have a General Election soon, probably in November but it would be a very brave or stupid person who claimed to know the likely outcome. We are certainly in a good position to be going into a campaign thanks to the steady and sure footed way in which Nicola has navigated the storms of the Brexit debates. Certainly, those who advocated unilateral action over the last 18 months or so must recognise that we are in a much stronger position simply because Nicola has steered a calm, careful pragmatic and principled course throughout and remains head and shoulders above any other Party Leader in the UK.

It is of course a matter of real regret that the bulk of the Scottish print and broadcast media remain so totally enthralled to the #SNPBAD line. As I posted on Facebook recently we had watched the movie Spotlight. It tells the story of a Boston Globe investigation into sexual abuse in the Church and the fight to suppress the story and the ultimate publication of it. Like All The President’s Men it shows what good honest investigative journalism can do. But it also highlights just what a craven crew the media are in Scotland.

It’s often claimed that there are lots of good honest journalists at work. With the exception of The National and to a degree Channel Four News, I don’t see the evidence. When Channel 4’s Head of News recently described Boris as a “known liar” and a “coward” (https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/aug/25/boris-johnson-interview-criticism-head-of-news-channel-4), they were frozen out by No 10. Instead of uniting the journalists to defend their right of free speech, they, with few exceptions, said virtually nothing. Even in the US when Trump tried to ban Jim Acosta much of the media gathered round the CNN reporter. No such support for Dorothy Byrne sadly.

Byrne told the BBC, “If someone has deliberately spoken an untruth and we have evidence, we have to consider saying that what is said is a lie.”

In her MacTaggart Lecture, she said, “What we all need to decide: what do we do when a known liar becomes our Prime Minister? I’ve talked to journalists from several television organisations about this issue. They said they would be loath to use that word ‘liar’.

“Remember when Andrew Marr told, [former defence secretary], Penny Mordaunt her claim that the UK couldn’t stop Turkey from joining the EU was ‘strange’?

“It was strange, but it was also untrue – a lie. Is it time for us to start using the L-word? I believe that we need to start calling politicians out as liars when they lie. If we continue to be so polite, how will our viewers know that politicians are lying?”

She added that it “isn’t necessarily obvious” to the audience when politicians are untruthful in interviews.

“They are not journalists, they don’t have all day to research stories,” she said on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Thursday, “Journalists have a purpose. We go away and study and research whether what politicians say is true and then we ask them informed questions and make them accountable.”

If only that was the case Dorothy! Maybe if they had we would all be in a much better place.