What you want to say – 30th November 2016 November 30, 2016
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.trackback
As always, following on Dr. X’s suggestion, it’s all yours, “announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose”, feel free.
for lefties too stubborn to quit
As always, following on Dr. X’s suggestion, it’s all yours, “announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose”, feel free.
worldbystorm2014ATgmailDOTcom
I see the Blades are playing the Academy, I think it’s 17th December.
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The unelected and therefore democratically illegitimate European Commission wants member states to spend more money on the military.
To that end they want to agree a collective ‘defence fund’ in December at an EU summit. But member states will decide how much money they want to contribute.
It won’t be in competition with NATO though. Oh no.
My bet is that further militarisation of Fortress Europe will result.
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EPA report encourages Minister Naughten to say that fracking is off the agenda here in Ireland for the foreseeable future…
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Really? That’s it for fracking?
What about the north?
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Just came across this great piece about an English WW1 veteran and hero of the Irish working class. On the Bogman’s Cannon via Come Here to Me via Facebook. Who say’s the internet’s good for nothing!
https://bogmanscannon.com/2016/10/05/the-curious-case-of-the-corpo-employee–who-worked-himself-to-death/
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Trump picks vulture for cabinet position; Wilbur Ross to be Commerce Secretary.
“Wilbur Ross, has an incredible track record as a “vulture capitalist”, meaning he buys businesses and investments that are in trouble, turns them around and makes millions each time he performs his magic.”
http://seekingalpha.com/instablog/393144-the-investment-contrarian/24511-forget-buffett-wilbur-ross-is-the-man-you-want-to-invest-with
‘U.S. billionaire Wilbur Ross sold his entire shareholding in Bank of Ireland for almost half a billion euros on Tuesday, to almost triple the value of a shrewd investment made at the height of the euro zone crisis.’
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-bank-of-ireland-ross-idUSKBN0EK1PH20140610
“a Manhattan billionaire who owned a West Virginia coal mine where 12 workers died in 2006….
In 2012, Ross, clad in purple velvet slippers, took the stage at a black-tie induction ceremony for the secretive Wall Street fraternity Kappa Beta Phi and sang show tunes mocking poor people,”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-wilbur-ross_us_582b4c04e4b01d8a014abacb
‘Ross said afterward that he knew about the safety violations’
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/trump-taps-billionaire-investor-ross-commerce-secretary-43755738
Michael Noonan now has a friend in the White House,-a predator who profits from the capitalized blood of murdered miners.
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As ever, more on predators. ‘Frightened by Donald Trump? You don’t know the half of it’. So says Monbiot:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/30/donald-trump-george-monbiot-misinformation
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how do you get a politician to say what party he is in? Tommy Broughan keeps telling reporters he is Independent but he won’t tell me when he left the Independents 4 change party
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“The movement, which now calls itself the Fight for 15, is demanding a minimum wage of at least $15 as well as the right to unionize. And Tuesday’s day of action proved just how massive it has now become. Strikes and protests weren’t limited to New York City — they reached 340 cities.”
https://thinkprogress.org/fight-for-15-four-years-e3f47b01ba71#.8klbf0d7g
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Sanders was fully behind this, if my memory is correct, and that probably accounted for much of his momentum. Trump’s cabinet of ghouls are determined, ideological, opponents of decent wages for workers and now they have the full repressive apparatus of the capitalist state at their disposal to stop the Fight for 15. The fate of this campaign will tell us much about the political lay of the land during Trump’s presidency.
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The danger of Trump’s surreal spectacle:
‘The president-elect is speaking the language of dictators….
By attacking the very notion of shared reality, the president-elect is making normal democratic politics impossible…
For the next four years, Donald Trump will seek to shred any institution that threatens his ability to unilaterally determine what is real…
if he succeeds, then the … logic of democratic discourse will have been wholly replaced with the surreal anti-logic of nightmares.”
https://thinkprogress.org/when-everything-is-a-lie-power-is-the-only-truth-1e641751d150#.16x13yyfk
And how to resist:
http://qz.com/846940/a-yale-history-professors-20-point-guide-to-defending-democracy-under-a-trump-presidency/
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“More than 2,000 U.S. military veterans plan to form a human shield to protect protesters of a pipeline project near a Native American reservation in North Dakota, organizers said, just ahead of a federal deadline for activists to leave the camp they have been occupying.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/north-dakota-backs-away-checking-cars-headed-pipeline-173642425–finance.html
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“Protesters at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation have successfully beat back the Dakota Access Pipeline, which will no longer be built across the sacred land, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced Sunday….
The news came after thousands of veterans poured into the Standing Rock Sioux reservation this past weekend to stand in solidarity alongside the Dakota Access pipeline protesters.”
nypost.com/2016/12/04/army-corps-of-engineers-wont-grant-easement-for-dakota-access-pipeline/
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‘Veterans Stand for Standing Rock’s GoFundMe.com page had raised more than $1 million of its $1.2 million goal by Sunday — money due to go toward food, transportation and supplies. Cars waiting to get into the camp Sunday afternoon were backed up for more than a half-mile.’
http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/national-international/Dakota-Access-Pipeline-Denied-near-sioux-reservation-404636436.html
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“But the celebrations may be short-lived, as Trump seems likely to reverse the Army Corps and approve the easement for the lake crossing….
Trump has been an investor in Energy Transfer Partners, the project’s developer, and his May financial disclosure said he has investments with Phillips 66, which owns a quarter of the pipe.”
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/us-army-corps-blocks-dakota-access-pipeline-232172
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Rest in Power Fellow Worker
https://mobile.twitter.com/InsurrectNews/status/804018566844399616
https://insurrectionnewsworldwide.com/2016/11/30/rest-in-power-anarchist-comrade-michael-israel-killed-fighting-islamic-state-fascists-in-rojava/
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Thank for that YC.
Anton Neshek was killed with him by Sultan Erdogan’s warplanes – the fourth German volunteer to die fighting with the YPG in Rojava.
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The ambiguity of prepositions:
with = alongside
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Found at random, but interesting:
https://thedublinreview.com/article/mosley-in-ireland/
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Enoch Powell made a similar case against the shoot-to-kill policy in Ireland a couple of generations later. There’s a BBC documentary from the late 80s (John Ware I think) where he’s one of the main interviewees criticizing the SAS and the Thatcher government, along with Seamus Mallon and Cathal Daly.
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People on the fascist spectrum can be surprisingly heterodox while adhering the lowest common denominators of the breed.
Umberto Eco’s piece on Ur-Fascism is well worth a read in this respect.
It was written in more postmodernist insouciance was still a thing, but this is remarkably prescient:
My italics.
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written in more -> written in a time when
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Hollande announces he won’t run.
Sans dents rejoice, supporters of Say’s Law dismayed.
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Looks like Francois Fillon will be elected to the Elysee next May.
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It looks like a choice between the French Thatcherite right (Fillon) and the far right (Le Pen). To be honest, I couldn’t call it myself. But here comes another presidential candidate, Jean-Luc Melenchon, an experienced politician who is supposed to be to the left of the Socialist Party. This is the same person who recently damned EU workers for “stealing jobs from French workers”. Makes me cringe.
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🙂 As someone missing four with three more on their way out, I say good riddance.
The worst former social-democrat of the last four years in Europe. And that’s a very low bar.
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‘he leaves a country on edge, and a left in tatters.’
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/02/francois-hollande-france-president-re-election-retreat-mixed-response-europe
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Print Room Dublin Castle, 12 Dec. Lectures all day. !916. Yeates on prisoners in 1916 etc. start 11-00 am. Don’t know how to upload further details.
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This is brilliant …. reads like Waterford Whispers http://www.limerickleader.ie/news/home/226302/crowds-gather-at-apparition-of-virgin-mary-in-limerick.html
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Have the chip vans arrived in the neighbourhood yet?
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Tawdy, where are you? We need the local CLR correspondent to give us the lowdown.
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I can appreciate why the Holy Mother has such a grá for Limerick.
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<nerd_alert>
The European Committee of Social Rights is the quasi-judicial body that oversees compliance with the European Social Charter (which is the less famous counterpart to the European Convention on Human Rights). It consists of 15 independent individuals who are experts in economic, social, cultural human rights, and they are elected by the 43 member states of the Council of Europe that have ratified the Charter.
A rotation of membership occurs this year, and five outgoing members either retired (because they had served two terms) or needed to be re-elected. (The electors, in secret ballot, are the ambassadors to the Council of Europe from the member countries.)
This election (and the series of others that preceded it in recent years) has resulted in a committee with only one non-EU member on it (and she is Norwegian, so definitely western European).
There is no representative from the west Balkans (Bosnia, Montenegro, Albania, etc.), eastern Europe (Moldova, Ukraine, Russia), the ‘caucasus’ states (Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia) or Turkey. A reasonable distribution across the 43 states would have seen four or five members elected from those countries.
This isn’t good for securing acceptance of economic, social and cultural rights as central to human rights across the Council of Europe.
</nerd_alert>
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Matteo Renzi has resigned and the Italian Constitutional looks set to return a ‘No’.
2016 has not been kind to centrists.
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Italian Constitutional Referendum*
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‘The euro fell sharply against the dollar after Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi suffered a heavy defeat in Sunday’s referendum.’
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-38203813
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And then it bounced back again.
‘The market’ seems to have this ritual blip during which they insiders make money and the pension funds loose it.
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Ben Carson nominated to be secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
““There are reasonable ways to use housing policy to enhance the opportunities available to lower-income citizens, but based on the history of failed socialist experiments in this country, entrusting the government to get it right can prove downright dangerous.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/11/28/ben-carson-trump-s-hud-pick-once-called-fair-housing-communism.html
“Later in the interview, Carson said he personally believed Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was encouraged by the devil.
As Charles Pierce wrote in Esquire: “What in the name of Edwin Hubble is this man talking about? Why is this man allowed out in public without a handler?”
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/ben-carsons-follies-7-most-stupefying-statements-gops-favorite-neurosurgeon
‘Carson told the graduates of Andrews University in Michigan that it is his “personal” belief that the pyramids were built as storehouses for grain and not, as archaeologists say, for the interment of dead pharaohs.’
http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/05/politics/ben-carson-pyramids-grain/
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A government of all the talents.
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https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/dec/05/amber-rudd-says-eu-nationals-in-post-brexit-uk-will-need-form-of-id
but it’s alright, it doesn’t include us. One thing I noticed this morning, though I think it’s always been thus; every other EU country has one EU passport queue and one non-EU queue. In Britain the first queue is ‘UK/EU’
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There are UK passports which are not EU passports (Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, for example).
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Ah yes. Fair point.
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Although the IoM and the Channel Islands aren’t in the UK either but are protectorates or crown possessions. And their passports are ‘British’ rather than ‘UK’
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You are indeed correct on the distinction. Other interesting thing from the wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jersey_passport
so there is a means of giving people rights in the UK without giving them rights in the EU, and presumably v.v. Could that be one way of dealing with Ireland after Brexit: treat it like a very big Jersey?
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We could pull on the very big (Green) Jersey, you mean?
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Or (Isle of) Man up?
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While pursuing this issue ad absurdam, I came upon this amusing exchange on Tripadvisor 🙂
https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/ShowTopic-g186227-i488-k6379847-Need_passport_for_Channel_Islands-Channel_Islands.html
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Saw a thing on the BBC NI news a while back. Garda boarding a bus coming from the north and asking people for passports. A bunch of eastern European lads were on the bus and I think they were detained here (or at least delayed) in the RoI cos they had no identification. They were working in some factory in Armagh or Down and the factory owner was on the news complaining about it.
Then I recently met a woman from Fermanagh, living in Belfast, who came down to Dublin for a sort of arts workshop I was attending. Same thing happened to her. She told them she had no i.d. and they let her carry on. She reckoned it was her accent got her through. As a Fermanagh nationalist, let’s say she was not impressed.
So don’t worry about the homeland security or whatever it’s called in the UK, we’re well up there with the xenophobic border patrols in the good old RoI.
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Saw notices in Copenhagen airport yesterday alerting intending passengers to Malmö by train that the Swedes would be checking ID before you got on the train; I.e. In Denmark.
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They used to stop the bus all the time, but it hasn’t happened to me in a year or so now. I never tended to have much to offer them ID-wise, but the accent and a picture-less card seemed enough. They’d often ask a couple of people to step off the bus – always depressing when someone didn’t get back on.
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Related: when is Schengen not really Schengen?
When you go from Poland to Germany (both, like Italy, nation states less to two centuries old BTW) you are crossing a border inside the Schengen Area, at which, at least theoretically, no passport needs to be shown.
However recently the German police check identities (on trains at least) after one crosses that border. I pointed out the fact that I’d just travelled from one Schengen state to another to the policepersons checking my identity.
Apparently it’s not a border check, oh no, it’s a ‘routine identity check’. Which just happens to take place after you cross the border.
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Before anyone starts on Poland being older – that was the ‘Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’. The Kingdom of Poland, as it was then is now 100 years old.
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I saw one of those on a train between Lille and Bruges once. Oddly enough the darkest-skinned person in the carriage got the most attention.
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To be fair they were completely neutral about it – regardless of skin colour or other detectable furriner-ness. And they let me off for not having my passport with me.
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It seems the Adult Swim network in the US have cancelled
the planned comedy “Million Dollar Extreme”. One of the show’s
creators, Sam Hyde, reported has strong ties to the alt-right movement:
http://www.avclub.com/article/adult-swim-cancels-alt-right-sketch-show-million-d-246917
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We have a good idea what will fill the Sindo this coming weekend. I’m sure ex-Senator Harass will have written a 2000 word column in 30 minutes in outrage at what has happened to his fellow employees of INM? Or maybe it is all the public sector’s fault?
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/pension-cut-at-independent-a-new-low-in-corporate-behaviour-1.2893832
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Any chance, you’d wonder, that journalists as a group would stop recycling, weekly, their article ‘why gold-plated public service pensions are unsustainable’ and start asking where the money actually ends up when defined benefit schemes are ended? Incidentally, Gene Kerrigan did an excellent analysis on the use of the word ‘unsustainable’ a week or two ago.
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I see Renua Cllr Patrick McKee has left, leaving cllrs Ronan McMahon, Keith Redmond and John Leahy
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Where’ll he end up next? SocDems? FG? Back to FF? SWP? SF?
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Clarity at last:
“I’m interested in all these terms that have been identified – hard Brexit, soft Brexit, black Brexit, white Brexit, grey Brexit – and actually what we should be looking for is a red, white and blue Brexit,”
Theresa May, today.
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Oh sweet Jay, did she actually say that?
I noted in passing that the Brit government’s basis for the current court case about parliamentary input into the triggering of Article 50 was “GB is a monarchy, all executive power emminates from the throne, and if she chooses to give the elected parliament a say, that’s up to her, parliament has no rights as such.”
What to say about a country where the armed forces are answerable to a Hannoverian aristo rather than to any kind of democratic structure.
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To be fair, the same is true in varying degrees in the three Nordic monarchies and in the Netherlands and Belgium.
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From the article on the Norwegian monarchy in Wikipedia:
Are you confident you could say that of the British military? Say, if the Antichrist J. Corbyn bumbled his way to the post of Prime Minister?
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Fascist-spectrum censorship and history-rewriting dept.
The PiSer turdballs have sacked the directory of a Polish cultural Institute in Berlin because her projects had ‘too much Jewish content’ and kept drawing attention to Polish complicity and pogroms, rather than celebrating pure ‘Polish’ culture.
Her specific crime against the Polish volk was to show a film about a woman who discovers she is Jewish and her family were murdered by their Polish Christian neighbours instead of some piece of propaganda about the current Polish Führer’s brother’s accidental death in a air-crash, which I won’t even dignify by naming.
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They have purged Polish cultural institutes outside Poland as well.
The nasty wee man from Poland probably has a bet going with the nasty wee man from Turkey.
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Mommy, why does Donnie have a bomb? Three pieces about how
a bad-tempered sociopath is about to get the power to kill tens of millions of people:
https://www.ft.com/content/8715175e-b550-11e6-ba85-95d1533d9a62
http://thediplomat.com/2016/11/could-trump-actually-start-a-nuclear-war/
http://www.smh.com.au/world/donald-trump-will-soon-learn-the-nuclear-codes-what-will-he-do-with-them-20161126-gsyc1e.html
Will the world get to 2022 without a nuclear detonation? 😦
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‘It’s extremely hazardous to have an “ignorant, thin-skinned megalomaniac“ who fires off angry 3am tweets in control of the nuclear codes,’-Chomsky.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/noam-chomsky-dismisses-megalomaniac-donald-trump-a7449151.html
But, said Chomsky ‘if young people and activists revived a strong labour movement, which could overcome racial conflict like it did in the 1930s, then the workers’ favour could be won back.’
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/bernie-sanders-donald-trump-noam-chomsky-supporters-labour-movement-racism-unions-wages-a7459126.html
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BeLonG To, Ireland, 2006:
PFLAG, Toronto, 2014:
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He’s definitely back:
https://www.socialeurope.eu/2016/12/britain-and-ireland-keeping-common-trade-and-travel-areas/
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The Bert and the Blair come back to save us on these Islands! Hurrah!
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/tony-blair-returning-to-politics-comeback-jeremy-corbyn-nutter-theresa-may-lightweight-a7427676.html
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News for Blair, Corbyn and May. Ukip leader, Paul Nuttall said: “We have this fantastic opportunity, which we’ve never had before to this extent, to move into Labour working-class communities and mop up votes. I think in some of these communities we can replace the Labour Party in the next five years and become the patriotic party of the working people.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/11/28/paul-nuttall-elected-new-ukip-leader-nigel-farage-finally-bows/
“There’s something going on in the continent of Europe. There’s an anti-establishment feel, which is growing, right across the rest of the world. And I want Ukip to be that vehicle here in the UK”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/nov/28/paul-nuttall-elected-as-ukip-leader
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This guy sound slike he could develop in the direction of facism. Plebian, anti-establishment, patriotic. Just needs to ditch the neo-liberalism from UKIP and there are just about there.
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