Verbal

Unfortunately, football these days requires brainers.

Gawd luv us, Lord 'Chicks' Pony is back in the manor. Would his ponyship care to comment on the matters raised rather than this pointless rabbit?

I notice that YouGov has Corbyn's polling lead falling around his anti-single market comments. As he continues to squander the momentum he gained from the election, the weird thing about him is that he seems intent on squandering it the most on Europe. While other senior Labour figures continue an unsustainable fudge, he's come out strongly against membership of either the single market or the customs union. The reason it's weird is that, on this issue, Corbyn is no Corbynista. He's a Chavismo. The vast majority of his acolytes are committed to retaining membership, largely, I suspect, because the economic damage of hard Brexit is recognised even by them as far too great. As a Chavismo, however, Corbyn buys into the core Hugo Chavez belief that the EU is a neo-liberal conspiracy against the poor. He votes against joining the EEC, against joining the single market, against Maastricht, and against Lisbon - against anything to with the EU. Not surprisingly, Corbyn is wrong, of course. Dangerously so. The EU is the diametric opposite of 'neo-liberal' - ordoliberal. The central tenet of neo-liberalism is the minimal state. Ordoliberalism is the management of the market for the best outcome for the majority - a kind of state-regulated utilitarianism. This is why, for example, in Germany and France, wages for working class citizens are higher, working and living conditions are better, and health is better. Corbyn doesn't see any of this, evidently. All he sees, Chavez style, is the conspiracy. So he won't be changing tack on membership any time soon. Watch his numbers continue to drop as his own members and Labour voters despair, even while the Tories continue, on Brexit and everything else, to offer the worst example of governance since Chamberlain.

It's not 'spin' to day that investment in electric cars is being moved onshore in the EU following the referendum. That's what's happening. After much lobbying by the government, BMW have allowed the Oxford plant to continue assembling (not manufacturing) Minis. But investment in the real technological cutting edge has been made inside the EU. Not one of the top-selling plug-in cars has its electric motor assembly made in the UK - in an industry that was until recently producing the second-highest number of assembled cars in Europe. (behind Germany).

Try 'Poltroon'. It's a good word. I agree that it's churlish and (literally) a bit childish not to look at something you disagree with, as if covering your eyes will make it go away. However, it's equally true that Townsend is a notorious Islamophobe who finds his natural allies among Prison Planet and other neo-fascist analogues. If you want something to challenge your perspective, try Reza Aslan's “No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam.” I don't happen to agree with much it, but it's a very well written textual defence of Islam. The big flaw in both books, and your position, though, is the very idea of reading religious violence back to a textual source in the Koran. All actions carried out in the name of religions are claimed to be 'in the name of' the religion. And insofar as they are, that religion IS a problem. But that doesn't mean that it's a legitimate argument to follow the extremists down the path of saying that the source of violence is in the Koran itself and Muhammad himself. For one thing, the Koran was written from a sort of group memory in the early caliphates, around a century after his death (not unlike large chunks of the Roman Bible). Also, many of the textual justifications for violence come from the Hadiths - religious fragments which have never been part of the Koran, and are crammed with dodgy content designed to suit the needs of a particular medieval despot. But the bigger issue is that the actual source and justification for extremist Islamist violence isn't textual so much as ideological. And that ideology is Wahhabism, an eighteenth century cult built around a woman-hating psychopath, whose ideas about the origins of Islam included advocating the destruction of every last piece of physical evidence that Muhammad and his descendants ever existed. Had it not been for oil, Wahhab's ideas - if that's what they were - would have remained buried in the dust in the backward Persian Gulf (the power centres and great civilisations of Islam had long since moved to Persia, Egypt and South Asia). Nope. You've slung in another random disqualifier, with the unevidenced generalisation that 'everyone was violent back in the 11th century.' To repeat: if your argument is that Islamist violence is inextricably linked textually to the Koran, you're wrong, for the reasons above. Religions are ultimately groups of people who, as groups, emphasise what they want to emphasise from source texts of various kinds, in order to justify their behaviour or beliefs. Just as the majority of Christians don't spend time highlighting the hyper-violence of the Book of Leviticus, because it offends them or is irrelevant to them, the vast majority of Muslims - all but a tiny fraction of a single percent - do not go hunting for textual references to violence in order to justify their day-to-day lives, which are of course completely free of violent impulses. The even bigger point, well understood by most theologians, is that religious adherence isn't in any case really about belief but about ritual. So when you get to corner a Jihadist - as no doubt you will - you'll be woefully disappointed to discover that he has a poorer understanding of the content of the Koran than even you. He will, though, have a really good understanding about how to bang his head on the ground five times a day. So far from having your point having been 'proven', unfortunately you do not have a point at all.

Introducing an arbitrary disqualifier doesn't disguise a losing argument. If violence is intrinsic to a particular religion, and the reason for it is supposed to be textually sourced, then it makes no difference whatsoever when that violence took place. The murderous Crusaders were every bit as certain that their massacres were religiously sanctioned as modern-day Jihadists.

None remotely on the same scale? The death toll from the Crusades - note: a religious attack initiated and sustained by the Latin church - was up to three million. Are the Crusades such a big secret that we only know about them by looking really, really hard?

Couldn't the 'fundamentalist dark ages' also be represented by the Crusades? Today, violent Hindu extremism in India and violent Buddhist extremism in Thailand and Burma - all directed at Muslim minorities - might rake in a few more religions, right?

Morgan Stanley have actually rented 8,000 sq metres in Frankfurt, so they're clearly planning on far more than a couple of hundred employees moving. But this is just the latest of many such announcements. Bank of America have just announced Dublin as their EU onshore base. Deutsche Bank employees have all been told that the bank is planning on a hard Brexit and so will move 4,000 jobs to Germany from London. Citigroup, UBS, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Standard Chartered have also announced detailed plans to move. Switzerland's largest private bank Julius Baer is planning raids on cheap UK assets (because of the all in the pound) but have decided against setting up shop in London because of Brexit. In insurance, AIG are off to Luxembourg, Lloyds 'of London' are setting up in Brussels. Hiscox is relocating some staff to Luxembourg. In private equity, MJ Hudson is off to Luxembourg. In aviation, both Ryanair and Easyjet are planning moves. In media, Eurupe's largest media group Bertelsmann is moving some of its UK operations into Europe. The South African investment group Brait has cancelled a London listing because of Brexit. BMW is to make the electric Mini outside the UK because of Brexit - in a British car industry that has seen a crash in post-referendum investment. And so on and on and on. That's all aside from a hugely long list of companies reporting huge downturns in revenues and profits because of Brexit. So I'm curious - what's the practical evidence of an upside of living in a country with a withering tax base? Perhaps Lord 'Chicks' Pony and fellow members of the economic death cult could tell us. And what's the upside of crippling the services sector in particular - a mere 80% of the British economy - all for a post-EU Brexiphate?

Hmm. I'm a long way from being an expert on this stuff, but I do wonder whether anyone's looked at the electrical substations around Grenfell. I don't live so far away, and had some electrical fitters bolt out the door after coming to fit an appliance and 'socket and see' testing...something or other (earth loop impedence?). Whatever it was, they said the problem was in surges from the local substation - a problem they encounter frequently in London - and that the National Grid was 'uninterested' in addressing the issue. So the problem may not be with the appliance....possibly.

Trailer for unmissable, but often unwatchable documentary about a group of extraordinarily courageous young journalists in Syria, whose heroism and truth is denied by Assadists among the Corbyn cult, because they fight ISIS while accusing Assad of being the bigger threat.

The terms were clearly set out. Losing membership of the single market and the customs union doesn't have a prayer of getting through this parliament. And it's not simply because the leading Brexiteers are as thick as mince. Although they are. Here's Andrea Leadsom celebrating Jane Austin as 'one of our greatest living authors.' https://twitter.com/AdamBienkov/status/887996769371652097/video/1

Does anyone still believe that hard Brexit - renouncing membership of the single market and the customs union - has any hope of getting through this parliament? It doesn't have a prayer.

I know plenty of exceptions to this, libeltim, and it's a cruel generalisation for those who've reached their 60s and 70s and are in a state of penury that this should be hung on people of a particular age. Most of my older neighbours here up north are living on the state pension alone. £150 a week for everything isn't a picnic. There have been some huge beneficiaries, it's true, but most of the explosive growth in the value of property happened from the mid-1990s onwards, and again between 2011 and 2016, which means there were large numbers of Gen X beneficiaries too. The 'wealth transfer from the young' idea plays too hard on the politics of envy. If Labour is to win power - and I don't believe it will under the present leadership - it needs to appeal, among others, to the very people you're demonising. But then that's the problem with Corbynism: it sees traitors and vote-murderers everywhere, as if anyone who had the temerity to vote even for Labour 1997-2010 was guilty of near-genocide (fanboy TM). Interesting to note, by the way, the claim by Corbyn himself immediately before the election that he will 'deal with' (implying he'd cancel) the billions in graduate debt. After the election this was downgraded to an 'ambition' by the execrable McDonnell, and then finally ruled out altogether by shadow education secretary Angela Raynor, who said the debt cancellation 'won't happen'. How refreshingly different is Corbyn...

And when you reach your Brexit Caliphate, and discover it's actually an economic Mosul, here is your god: http://www.li.com/legatum-institute This bunch of know-nothings apparently have the undivided attention May and Davis, which accounts, in part at least, for the staggeringly ignorant nonsense that emanates from the Cabinet. Just to be clear, a breakdown in EU talks isn't some magical route to the sunny la la land imagined by Gove - only true-believing Jihadists would believe that.

Yep, confirmation that Lord Pony has the comprehension skills of a toddler. Interesting news tonight, after David 'thick as mince' Davis empty-desked Barnier and walked away from heading negotiations after fifteen whole minutes: EU negotiators are saying they will put talks on hold - 'stall them' - until Britain decides it wants to engage seriously in the talks. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/eu-halt-brexit-talks-michel-barnier-brussels-david-davis-a7847641.html Might it have been a good idea for May et al to work out what they wanted from Brexit before actually starting negotiations? Tick tock.

In fairness, 'deeply divided' applies the Labour too, in relation to Brexit. Here's the excellent Stephen Bush (of the New Statesman but writing in the Standard): "The difficult truth is that Labour’s official line on Brexit sounds stupid because it is stupid..." http://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/stephen-bush-divided-labour-hasn-t-a-clue-or-a-clear-leader-on-brexit-a3589501.html So if a chaotic Brexit happens, which looks highly likely, it will ONLY be because politicians from both main parties are in a state of collective paralysis, a kind of mutually assured destruction, which can't prevent an exit that guarantees wiping out the currency, public finances, and large swathes of the service sector (a mere 80% of the economy).

Bad news for you and all dreary misogynists: Dr Who's a woman. Register your outrage here: https://twitter.com/aljwhite/status/886612431786692608

And thirdly, the Labour party is led by equally clueless gimps. Here's the supposedly bright new thing Rebecca Long-Bailey, aping BoJo's much-discredited line 'having our cake and eat it.' In the same interview she even uses the phrase 'Brexit means Brexit' https://twitter.com/daily_politics/status/886535987572031489 The ignorance emanating from the two main parties - more than a year on from the referendum and while negotiations are running down the clock - is utterly mind-blowing. No wonder the EU negotiators are reduced to open-mouthed amazement, forced to ask 'What do you want?' of British negotiators. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jul/15/indecision-brexit-eu-negotiations-diplomats-no-compromise

The facts might amount to 'zero' if you bury your head deep and long enough that you refuse to face them. Here's Corbyn consorting happily with Greek 'journalist' Marcus Papadopoulos, who maintains that the Srebrenica massacre of Muslim men and boys by Serbians was a hoax. This scumbag also insists that the siege of Sarajevo didn't happen. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/srebrenica-genocide-denier-marcus-papadopoulos-dines-with-corbyn-bqc2mvzlh The reason Corbyn cosies up to him is clear enough. Papadooulos is also an Assadist, and this appeals immensely to St Jeremy's knee-jerk anti-Western outlook. The fact that he's also a revolting apologist for genocidal Islamophobic psychopaths is neither here nor there. Still, everyone needs 'friends', right fanboy? And just to highlight the cretinism of your second sentence, are you really so so dim as to be unable to distinguish between an argument and an individual? What exactly is wrong with Blair's argument that Brexit + Corbyn government would be a disaster? You may think you have an answer - so why don't you give one, instead of resorting to pathetic ad hominems? Oh, and 'blood on my hands'? That's rich. I'm no Blairite, and never have been, and like the majority of the country I was vehemently against the war (somewhat informed by knowing the place). What I have been all these years is (mostly) a Labour voter - you know, the kind of person you're going to have to convince to vote Labour again in the future. Not going well so far, is it?

But get off the damned bus now if you're Jewish, right fanboy? Or if you voice any dissent aimed at St Jeremy, even if you've been a Labour member or supporter or voter for years. Corbyn meanwhile sails on in his usual cynical, unprincipled way. It used to be said that Blair was about as far right as anyone could imagine the left could be, until Corbyn came along and adopted UKIP's policy on Brexit. It used to be said that no one in the Labour party would be seen dead snuggling up to Islamophobes, until Corbyn happily has dinner and poses for selfies with a prominent conspiracy loon who says the Srebrenica massacre in 1995 never happened, despite the overwhelming evidence that 8,000 Muslim-Bosnian men and boys were systematically slaughtered by Serbian paramilitaries. Etc, ad ****ing nauseum. There actually was a pretty good article by Blair today, pointing out that Brexit followed by Corbyn would bring this country to its knees. It's striking how so many Corbynistas have reacted with white-eyed fury, denouncing Blair as the voice of purest evil. I haven't read one response yet, arguing that Blair is actually wrong.

The May government has finally chickened out of publishing the names of countries involved in funding of violent Islamist extremism for fear of offending the no 1 source of that funding - Saudi Arabia. Taking sides with the chief state sponsor of Jihadism is the natural outcome for those with a hard Brexit Caliphate in mind. If the cap fits... https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jul/12/uk-terror-funding-report-will-not-be-published-for-national-security-reasons

Brexit Jihadist convicted for offering money to have a Remainer murdered: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/brexit-gina-miller-viscount-guilty-rhodri-colwyn-philipps-calls-violence-run-over-a7836011.html

Interesting detail about the Article 50 letter May sent along to Tusk in March - it included specifically that the UK would withdraw from Euratom. The Labour party manifesto equally makes specific reference to Euratom - saying that retaining full membership of it would be an essential part of any Labour-influenced Brexit. Given her careless mislaying of her majority, May now faces the possibility of having to cave to get Labour support, and of having to go back to Tusk to drop a key proposal in the Article 50 announcement. He may or may not agree to accede. With that, the Brexit Caliphate will take one small but significant step away from becoming reality...

BJ for short. Better?