Which EU law are you most looking forward to losing?

[Potemkin Villager]

Which is your most hated EU law? This guy is simply bananas!

http://www.lbc.co.uk/radio/presenters/j ... to-losing/

[johnhemming2]

I did a debate during the referendum with Bill Etheridge and he agreed that having trade rules about bananas set at the continental level is a good idea.

[Little John]

Which is your most hated EU law? This guy is simply bananas!

http://www.lbc.co.uk/radio/presenters/j ... to-losing/

Border controls- fishing territories - taxing and spending choices - state intervention in key primary industries - TTIP - DEMOCRACY (remember that)? - Obrien and his ilk are arseholes. Or, at least, if they must persist with this, then it is at least incumbent on them to formulate cogent arguments instead of constantly trying to impune and denigrate the intelligence of those on the opposing side of this argument. This kind of thing is both pathetic and indicative that they don't actually have a cogent argument of their own.

There are two halves to this country. There is the half where, due to deliberate policy, the money and jobs are concentrated. Amongst this half, are the majority of people who are doing very nicely thank-you with BAU.

Meanwhile, the other half have seen their standard of living, pay and conditions and all the rest be steadily eroded over what is now several decades. This erosion was masked, to some extent, in the early decades of decline with the introduction of easy debt. Which, when it first exploded onto our economy in the early 80s, allowed everyone, including the half that were otherwise losing out, to carry on like there was no problem. However, beneath even the structural iniquities of corporate-capitalism, are the intractable four horsemen that we all know about on here including peak industrial resources, ecological degradation, climate change and, finally, the driver of it all, a massive overshoot of the global human population.

But, all the chickens are now coming home to roost and the first to feel the effects of that in this part of the world are the ones for whom debt has become an integral and essential part of their income streams. For such people, the infrastructural elements of our society are essential. Decent schools, medical care at the point of need irrespective of income and all of the other things.

For such people, the LAST thing they need is a massive influx of cheap labour driving down their pay and living conditions yet further. This is not racism. It is not bigotry. It is DESPERATION. Just because many (though by no means all) of the people with such concerns are from the lower socioeconomic echelons of society and so may lack the education or language to express themselves as well as the smug, liberal chattering classes who clearly despise them so much does not make their concerns less real or less legitimate.

Now, of course, I do understand how the other half feel with the result of the BREXIT referendum. They feel like their future has been stolen from them and their children and they are lashing out in bewilderment and rage. Welcome to the world of the proletariat and precariat of the rest of this nation. We first experienced that feeling 35 odd years ago but nobody seemed to notice.

Well, they are noticing now aren't they.

[Potemkin Villager]

Because of the historical genesis and the disgracefully emotionally manipulative manner in which the referendum propaganda campaign was conducted it is not surprising that much, quite intentional, confusion surrounds Brexit. The person interviewed reflects this confusion and I do not think the interviewer particularly gave him a hard time.

I believe that when people discover that leaving the EC is not the panacea for all of society's ills that they were convinced it was, and many of these are ills are in fact native and home grown rather than the fault of nasty foreigners, they will not react well at all.

They will react even worse when they discover that in fact the end result of all this actually makes things considerably worse for the majority of those living in the UK.

Whose fault is that doing to be?

[Little John]

Such an interview could just as easily be directed at an ignorant Remain voter. So what? Except, of course, we don't get to see those interviews do we. This is just more liberal propaganda aimed at portraying Leave voters as ignorant, xenophobic morons. And, of course, a certain degree of xenophobia is mixed in with all of it, particularly in the less educated sections of society.

Howowerver, xenophobia is often just the dumb-ass expression of more general immigration concerns by people who lack the intellect or language to provide more intellectually acceptable reasons. That is to say, people find it almost impossible to live with the making of hard moral choices honestly for reasons of an inevitable cognitive dissonance between what they have been taught is right and what they instinctively know is pragmatically right. Consequently, people in such a bind tend to invent narratives that dehumanize the "other". That way, it is easier to make those hard moral choices. Far easier to say "No" to some poor wretch languishing in, say, Calais when one considers them less human than oneself, than it is to say "No" simply because the practical consequences prohibit it as a sensible course of action.

In other words, I am saying here, quite unequivocally, that immigration concerns are in principle entirely legitimate. We live on an island that has 60 plus million people on. Where we import 40% of our food and the other 60% that we grow here is reliant on massive annual application of hydrocarbon based fertilizers that are extracted from now largely imported natural gas. Further to this, due to the "efficiencies" of modern trade, our internal shore-to-plate supply chain of imported food is now only 6 days long.

Additionally, you may or may not have noticed, but the Yanks are busy fomenting a renewed cold war between east and west as they all begin to fight over the scraps of hydrocarbons that are left and upon which our entire global industrial civilization depends. It is in this context that international supply chain interruptions are a very real possibility. If that were to happen to the UK in terms of energy or food, this country would be starving within weeks. All of which is why it is INSANITY to be allowing an influx of migrants to this country. Not only is it unsustainable in practical terms, it is also playing with fire in political terms. As times get ever tougher, as they are going to inevitably do, the indigenous population will finally turn on the political class and anyone else they deem to be dragging their living conditions down. We will see the rise of the new far right. Indeed, we ARE seeing that right now. BREXIT is just one manifestation of that and it should serve as a warning sign to the liberal intelligentsia. But, instead, all they can think to do is spit their dummies out and shout insults at the proletariat for making the "wrong" decision.

So, what can we do to stop these overarching global processes? The answer is nothing, fundamentally. We are at the beginning of a Long Emergency and it is now inexorable in terms of playing itself out.

The World's farmlands are knackered. All of the ancient freshwater aquifers are rapidly depleting. The climate is rapidly heating up and we are living through the biggest mass extinction event since the end of the Permian.

Underneath all of this, because it is the driver of all the others, is a massive overshoot of the human population, the vast majority of whom naturally wish to engage in the very industrial lifestyle that has led us to this impasse. Not that it matters much now anyway, since there are now so many people damage is occurring irrespective of industrialization.

So, what do humans REALLY need to do? They need to change direction. Radically. What are humans doing? Devising ever more ingenious ways to carry on in the same direction as before. But, the destination will be the same and will be even worse than it might have been.

Technology will not save us or the rest of life on earth from what is coming. The only thing we get to choose is how we manage the fall. Either a new form of socialism is ushered in, allowing us to retain at least some semblance of civilization as we rebuild from the ashes of what remains. Or we will return to barbarism.

Having said that and understanding that, in principle, socialism is the collective sharing of social responsibility by all people, there is, however, quite a journey to be made from here to there, assuming that the reality of resource scarcity and the sheer scale of logistics involved in organizing that social responsibility at a global level do not prove ultimately intractable. Which, in all honesty, I think will prove to be intractable.

The above being the case, I consider that socialism must first be fought for and organized within national borders. As socialist nations develop, then they can form alliances which allow for the gradual dissolution of their borders with each other (in short, a Soviet-type socialist model minus the purges and gulags). Meanwhile, the REAL world we ACTUALLY live in right now is capitalist and so long as that is the majority reality a socialism without borders is dead before it is born. In other words, despite it being a dirty term, having being appropriated by a certain Mr Hitler, I must define myself as a national socialist on pragmatic grounds, whilst being an international socialist in terms of my long term aspirations.

One thing is for sure, we all need to start getting real and damned fast. All of our precious liberal ideals, born of the time of plenty that came with the industrial age, are not fit for purpose for what is coming.