Tag Archives: Angela Merkel

‘Leave’ campaign’s response to Angela Merkel IS RACISM

Racist: This image by Brexiteers Leave.EU refers to the two world wars and shows German leader Angela Merkel giving an approximation of a Nazi salute. It also refers to her by the racist term “kraut”. It is designed to drum up racist sentiment against Germany. It deserves prosecution under our anti-racism laws.

Brexiteers have adopted a new tactic in their bid to drum up public support for their plan to leave the European Union without any withdrawal agreement. It’s called racism.

After a telephone conversation with Boris Johnson in which Angela Merkel reportedly said a deal based on his current proposals was “overwhelmingly unlikely”, the campaign group Leave.EU, run by the infamous Arron Banks and Brexit Party chairman Richard Tice, released the image above.

It is racist for all the reasons set out in the caption.

Worse, European newspapers seem to be pushing the opinion that it – and those behind it – are succeeding in their attempt to sway public opinion here in the UK.

European newspapers and commentators rounded on the “outrageous” tactics of an “out-of-control” Downing Street after a string of leaks sought to blame France, Ireland and Germany for the Brexit breakdown – but they warned the EU would not fall for them.

For Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung, Boris Johnson’s Brexit strategy “may be recognised as transparent in Brussels and outrageous in Berlin – but in the UK it seems, for the time being, to be working”.

The plan was to insist that the UK was “heading for no deal, either before or after the next election – it’s just a matter of time”, and all because the EU is “not prepared to compromise. We gave it our all, but it was not sufficient. Now enough is enough.”

Suggesting Germany was largely at fault was, of course, deliberate, the paper said. “Aversion to Britain’s wartime opponent, and its return to power via Brussels, was a reason for many especially older Britons to vote for Brexit.” Cue the inevitable reactions from leave voters: “Merkel is to blame, Germany is showing its true face, Berlin always wanted to subjugate us, the EU must be smashed.”

Johnson and his senior adviser, Dominic Cummings, “have always threatened no deal, paying mere lip service to an agreement”, the paper noted. “The UK’s latest proposal was obviously not designed to make a deal possible in a short time.”

The EU is unlikely to give in to this threat, SZ said. But No 10’s psychology was different: “It aims to oblige the Commons to force a Brexit delay – and then sees angry voters re-electing Johnson by a large majority.”

In a piece headlined the Saboteur, Der Spiegel reckoned that Johnson, thwarted in his desire for no deal by parliament, was “embarking on a last-ditch attempt to make it possible – this time, triggered by the EU”. He was “doing everything possible to prevent the EU unanimously approving a new Brexit extension”.

But that was all just for show, said the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad. Johnson and Cummings were putting “more persuasiveness and energy into shifting the blame for a new Brexit extension than into securing an 11th-hour deal on Britain’s exit from the EU”.

The prime minister, it said, had seen the polls and knew he could win a large majority at the next election. He may “hint that he wants to drive the EU nuts, with a no deal on 31 October as the consequence, but that’s for domestic consumption. He knows he has no chance of success: the UK is heading for postponement and early elections.”

So Johnson is “now doing everything possible to avoid taking responsibility for the delay”. Tuesday’s events played out “exactly as No 10 wanted”, the paper said.

“Without a German reply, without any traceable involvement of No 10, the British public gained the impression that the EU was being intransigent, Johnson was standing up to them as a patriot, and that postponing Brexit will not be his fault.”

Are we really a nation of racists?

Is that what nine years of Conservative-led rule has done to the once-great-and-tolerant United Kingdom?

No. We aren’t and it isn’t.

Not when we have people who can produce responses like this:

And this:

And we must not allow the Brexiteer strategy of racism and scapegoating EU nations – particularly Germany – to swing the more impressionable members of the UK public into supporting him.

What we’re seeing is evidence that everything Boris Johnson and his team have done has been geared to fool us.

His plan has changed.

He wanted to leave without a deal on October 31.

But now he wants to delay Brexit – and pretend the European Union is to blame.

So let’s get the message right.

Boris Johnson is deliberately delaying Brexit to fool you into voting for him.

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Where are Dictator Johnson’s new proposals for an EU withdrawal deal?

Er…: This is the (unattractive) face of a man who has no answers about a Brexit deal because he wants to leave the EU without one.

More than 11 days after Boris Johnson accepted a challenge to solve the Northern Ireland border backstop issue and devise a new EU withdrawal agreement within 30 days, he has yet to come forward with anything.

That’s according to the BBC’s Katya Adler. She makes a very important point:

Proroguing Parliament does not provide space to agree a Brexit deal because Parliament has to approve it first – and Dictator Johnson is making it harder for Parliament to do that.

Technically-minded negotiators say a new solution that respects both the EU’s and UK’s “red lines” is a “unicorn”.

We may conclude that Mr Johnson most certainly did not prorogue Parliament to agree a new deal. In fact, it seems, the reason he did it is the exact opposite – to prevent Parliament from interfering with his planned “no deal” Brexit.

Oh, and by the way:

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As national leaders squabble, is Ireland heading for a return of the ‘Troubles’?

Who do you believe?

Boris Johnson says the Northern Ireland border backstop must be removed from the UK’s withdrawal agreement with the EU, or there can be no agreement.

Emmanuel Macron says it must stay.

Angela Merkel says she’s keen to hear what BoJob proposes as an alternative – but he can’t leave it until the last minute.

The Irish EU commissioner says Mr Johnson is “gambling with peace”.

And a group of Conservative MPs have pointed out that the backstop isn’t the only contentious part of the withdrawal document in any event!

It seems to This Writer that the Conservative Party’s leaders have decided that they don’t like peace in Ireland and want it to stop.

Source: Macron tells Johnson Brexit backstop is indispensable | Politics | The Guardian

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Theresa May sticks to her ‘red lines’. Is she having some kind of breakdown?

There’s definitely a communications breakdown going on. I think Mrs May could have suffered a form of nervous breakdown too.

I mean, her actions hardly seem rational, do they?

Here‘s the Torygraph telling us that, after her cross-party talks (she talked; everyone else was supposed to listen), she has changed not one single part of her Brexit plan, not one single line of her deal:

“Theresa May has left European diplomats in a state of “disbelief” following a series of phone calls to EU leaders in which she made no change to her demands despite her Brexit plan being voted down by a 230-vote margin this week.

“Senior EU diplomatic sources said that Mrs May’s unchanged stance was ‘greeted with incredulity’ following a call with the German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday night.

“’It was the same old story – the same set of demands – all unchanged despite the defeat,’ said the source with knowledge of the calls.

“Mrs May is understood to have repeated the same performance in conversations with the French president Emmanuel Macron [and others including the Dutch prime minister].”

Inevitably, the media are still trying to sell us a lie that Jeremy Corbyn is the intransigent one.

Watch the following Channel 4 News interview in which Keir Starmer makes it clear that there’s no point in Jeremy Corbyn meeting Mrs May unless she relaxes her “red lines”, and Cathy Newman still accuses him of being the block – repeatedly and nonsensically:

Clearly someone is living in a fantasy world – and it isn’t Mr Starmer. It isn’t Mr Corbyn either.

So I’m starting to wonder if the image at the top of this article isn’t an accurate impression of what might happen at the next meeting between Mrs May and the Queen.

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Brexit: ‘Make me an offer’ says May – but nobody wants to talk with her

This is how we should all treat Theresa May.

Theresa May’s week has not started in a very intelligent way, has it?

Not only is she facing rebellion from all sides at home, thanks to her hopeless mismanagement of her own party, as described in This Site’s earlier article

Not only has a report shown that the UK will be worse off after Brexit, no matter what we do with it…

The government’s new analysis of the impact of Brexit says the UK would be worse off outside the European Union under every scenario modelled.

The assessment, which is titled “EU Exit Analysis – Cross Whitehall Briefing” and dated January 2018, looked at three of the most plausible Brexit scenarios based on existing EU arrangements.

Under a comprehensive free trade agreement with the EU, UK growth would be 5% lower over the next 15 years compared to current forecasts, according to the analysis.

The “no deal” scenario, which would see the UK revert to World Trade Organization (WTO) rules, would reduce growth by 8% over that period. The softest Brexit option of continued single-market access through membership of the European Economic Area would, in the longer term, still lower growth by 2%.

These calculations do not take into account any short-term hits to the economy from Brexit, such as the cost of adjusting the economy to new customs arrangements.

Not only did the EU take just two minutes deciding what it was going to offer the UK in the next round of Brexit negotiations…

The European Union’s 27 remaining countries have formally agreed on the terms they will offer Britain for its Brexit transition period.

The negotiating guidelines were agreed by the member states after only a two minute discussion, the European Commission’s deputy chief negotiator Sabine Weyand said on Monday afternoon.

The decision was made at a meeting of the EU’s general affairs council in Brussels, which the UK did not attend – as is convention for decisions regarding Brexit.

Not only did Angela Merkel expose Mrs May to ridicule over her negotiating technique (what negotiating technique?)…

Angela Merkel reportedly left journalists “laughing uproariously” after mocking Theresa May‘s attempts to negotiate a trading relationship post-Brexit.

The German chancellor said she had been trapped in a recurring conversation with the British Prime Minister since the EU referendum in 2016.

Speaking to a “secret” press meeting at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Ms Merkel claimed Ms May had repeatedly asked her to “make me an offer”, according to a report by ITV political pundit Robert Peston.

Ms Merkel said that when she replied “but you’re leaving – we don’t have to make you an offer. Come on what do you want?”, Ms May replied again, “Make me an offer.”

“And so, according to Mrs Merkel, the two find themselves trapped in a recurring loop of ‘what do you want?’ and ‘make me an offer’,” Mr Peston wrote on his Facebook page.

But it turns out Gibraltar can veto any final deal!

The chief minister of Gibraltar has said he is ready to veto parts of the Brexit deal agreed by Theresa May if it does not work in the territory’s favour.

Speaking exclusively to The Independent, Fabian Picardo said he would not accept anything in the deal that was detrimental to Gibraltar’s business or social care systems.

Mr Picardo, who presides over a region that delivered the highest Remain vote – 96 per cent – of anywhere in the EU referendum, also called for a second vote on the final terms of any Brexit agreement.

Of course he wants a second vote. He knows Brexit is insanity – and so do we, after the report mentioned above.

But Tories don’t want to allow it because refusal would ruin their plans to take away what’s left of our rights and property.


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Why so much hysteria over the Hellenic debt?

It's all looking a bit tense, isn't it? In fact, Alexis Tsipras could have this look on his face because he's playing a particularly tricky game of Spider Solitaire on his laptop - it's the Troika that should be scared at the moment.

It’s all looking a bit tense, isn’t it? In fact, Alexis Tsipras could have this look on his face because he’s playing a particularly tricky game of Spider Solitaire on his laptop – it’s the Troika that should be scared at the moment.

Greece defaulted on its loan from the ILF last night (Tuesday). Gosh.

The world didn’t stop turning; life went on; and if there was any mass hysteria, it was on the part of neoliberals who – it seems – will do anything to keep everyone else in line with their worldview.

The neoliberals at the IMF, ECB and EU want people to believe that Greece (and, in fact, any other country that takes out a loan from western banks) has the wherewithal to pay back its debts. Their way of life depends on it because without that belief, countries start demanding debt relief packages and the whole racket that – as Vox Political mentioned yesterday – returned around $5 for every $1 lent in 2011 will fall like the house of cards it is.

Fintan O’Toole had it right in the Irish Times: “The story must be maintained: Greece must keep punishing its people to pay back the money being borrowed to make the payments on the unpayable loans.

“In the upside-down world we inhabit, Syriza, which has called a halt to this fiction, is a bunch of mad fantasists, while the troika that goes on acting as if the fictions were real is the voice of hard-headed realism. Everything – from the lives of ordinary Greeks to the foundations of the European Union – must be sacrificed to the story.”

But nobody believes that story any more. Everyone knows that Greece doesn’t have the wherewithal to pay back its debts. In fact, increasingly harsh demands by the Troika have made the problem worse, rather than better.

Everybody knows that debt relief will have to happen.

The Guardian‘s economics editor, Larry Elliott, wrote: “Somehow or other, Greece’s debt burden will be reduced. It can happen through a deal in which Athens gets debt relief for economic reform. Or it can came through a default that would swiftly follow Greek exit from the single currency.”

Richard Murphy, of Tax Research UK, agrees: “This fact has been obvious for some time. Greece has rising debt that is well above any internationally recognised sustainable level and because of falling income, imposed on it by the EU and IMF, has not the remotest chance of paying that debt off.”

He continues: “What is left is unserviceable without radical reform of the Greek economy that permits it to grow again, and that reform is not possible unless existing debt is written off. That’s because without that write off all the money needed to invest for growth will instead go in debt servicing,” as Vox Political has also mentioned in the past.

“If Greece was a company a pre-packaged insolvency would probably solve most of its problems, in days. It is time we did the same for countries. But don’t hold your breath because bankers object to this, largely because the guarantee that countries won’t fail is what they think underpins their own risk, and the last thing they want to do is accept responsibility for that.”

But Greece has failed. It is precisely its membership of the Euro that made it inevitable. Without its own sovereign currency, Greece could not take measures to prevent that failure. So Mr Murphy is right again and the banks are wrong. Again.

Meanwhile the neoliberal attempt to rule Greece undemocratically from beyond that country’s borders continues. The current plan is to make wild claims about the purpose of the yes/no referendum on the new loan conditions, called by Alexis Tsipras, to take place on Sunday. Merkel, Hollande and Juncker want the Greek people to believe it is about whether they stay in the Euro – which is not an inevitable consequence of a ‘no’ result, and would not, in any case, be a disaster (see yesterday’s post).

They’ve already lost that one, though. You see, everybody knows what’s on the table isn’t their last offer. They already gave in on that one, several renegotiations ago. If they had pulled the plug the instant Greece started to demur, they would have had leverage when Greece came back to the table but they didn’t. Now they’re on the sliding scale. They’ve admitted they need Greece to be paying back something, which means that Greece is now in a position to decide what that something should be.

(I got the above from an episode of Doctor Who entitled Deep Breath; if someone threatens to kill you and then doesn’t, they have nothing left with which to threaten you, having foolishly gone to their most extreme option first. Good show, Doctor Who.)

Angela Merkel has said the Troika won’t negotiate on anything at all until after the referendum. This has given Mr Tsipras a chance to bring in a new offer – it doesn’t even matter what it is – making him look like the reasonable man at the table. Already Merkel is on the back foot. She can refuse, look unreasonable and face a ‘no’ vote on Sunday, or she can agree, look weak and – again – face a ‘no’ vote on Sunday.

What are the neoliberals going to do?

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Greece could break Austerity – if Tsipras has the courage

150324tsipras-merkel

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has been meeting German Chancellor Angela Merkel to discuss his country’s economic strategy and debt repayments.

The point of Austerity in Greece was never to help that country pay off its debts; it was to create a permanent debt that Greece would never be able to pay off.

Under a submissive government, this was feasible – as it has been in many countries in what is laughably called the Developing World – but now Syriza has taken control and Alexis Tsipras could have the Troika (European Central Bank, IMF and the European Union – the three organisations that have been lending money to the Greek government) over a barrel.

The plan was to add Greece to the list of nations running a ‘zombie economy’ in the service of neoliberal corporate interests, rather than the well-being of its own citizens.

The Troika’s settlement with Greece was similar to that carved out by the western banks with the Developing World – the creation of a Debt Trap.

Western banks indulged in a lending spree across the Developing World during the latter half of the 20th century but the oil shocks of the 1970s created a domino effect of economic disaster which ended up putting most of Africa and Latin America on the verge of bankruptcy.

They could not be allowed to default on their debts. This would have allowed those countries to recover but would have harmed the western world – both economically and politically, as its influence would have faded.

So the IMF stepped in with ‘bridging loans’, ensuring that the original debts could be serviced – but there was a cost. In return for these loans, the IMF created a mechanism called the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP – an appropriate acronym as it has sapped away a huge amount of money from every nation where it has been used).

The SAP set conditions under which debtor nations were provided the bridging loans: The sale of nationalised industries and resources – mostly to foreign-owned corporations and governments; the removal of capital controls on money flowing into and out of these nations; allowing the IMF to dictate the level of public spending; prioritising debt repayment and corporate welfare over infrastructure investment and human welfare; and suppression of wages and restrictions on trade unions.*

This is more or less the deal that Greece was offered.

The result has been clear – as Professor Simon Wren-Lewis pointed out in his Mainly Macro blog yesterday: “Austerity… is of course why Greek GDP has fallen by 25 per cent.”

At the moment, the Troika is threatening Tsipras with the loss of further loans, as he has stated that he intends to reverse the privatisations that have been forced on Greece over the last few years, raise the minimum wage, and increase public spending. These are measures designed to reverse the Troika-engineered Greek economic collapse and make it possible to start paying off the huge debt the country has built up.

Tsipras wants that money because he wants his economic recovery to take place in an orderly way, so he has agreed not to roll back the privatisations that have already taken place but to review those that haven’t; to introduce collective wage-bargaining, stopping short of raising the minimum wage but encouraging non-statutory wage rises; and tackling the humanitarian crisis with free medical care for the uninsured unemployed, along with housing guarantees, at no extra cost to the public purse.

But here’s the thing: Greece can manage without that loan money, if it has to. Yes, there will be a great deal of pain, but Tsipras effectively has the Troika over a barrel. The promise of some money is better than no money. All he has to do is hold his nerve and point out that what the Troika is doing is exactly the opposite of what it is supposed to be doing.

By funding Greece during Austerity, the Troika was perpetuating its debt, rather than helping end that debt; now it is actively fighting a plan that will genuinely help end that debt. And the world can see this.

It is an important lesson for the UK, as well. This country didn’t need the Troika to enforce privatisation, wage suppression, public spending restrictions and so on because we have a neoliberal Conservative-led government that is already avid for those things.

Our economy has suffered badly – and our people have suffered brutally – because of these choices by rich Conservatives who have not had to bear any of the pain themselves.

For no reason.

It seems possible that both Greece and the UK could probably take a leaf out of 1920s German chancellor Gustav Streseman’s book – re-industrialisation and (in Greece’s case) renegotiation of loans and an exit from the Euro in order to create a new currency. Whether that is practical is best left to economists who have more expertise than a layman like this writer.

What is clear is that Austerity – and its champions – are bad for everybody’s national interest.

*Austerity – The Demolition of the Welfare State and the Rise of the Zombie Economy, Kerry-Anne Mendoza, published by New Internationalist. Pick up a copy now!

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