Civil Note from Chaotic UK Regarding the Brexit Mess!

There will still be an election in the UK, and Brexit will still happen

by Dan Hannan   at  the Washington Examiner:

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Life in Britain is pretty great right now. It’s the loveliest time of year: The rankness of high summer has passed, but the hedgerows remain thick and green, flecked with the first hints of autumn color. We are gripped by one of the most dramatic Ashes series ever: our regular cricket clash with Australia. Employment is at record levels. The deficit has finally been eliminated. The governing Conservative Party is 10 points ahead in the opinion polls.

I feel I have to lay these things out for overseas audiences, because a casual glance at the headlines might give you the impression that the United Kingdom is in the throes of some terrible crisis. The New York Times and the Washington Post, in particular, now run hilarious articles on an almost daily basis about how dreadful everything suddenly is “because of Brexit.”

Yes, there is a crisis in Parliament, but, outside Westminster, things are ticking along very nicely. In the three years since the referendum, Britain has attracted more foreign investment than any country in the world except China. Our stock exchange is surging. There are more EU nationals working in the U.K. than ever, belying the Times’ idiotic claims of a faltering economy, let alone rising xenophobia.

What of the shenanigans at Westminster? Well, one thing that I can state definitively is that they are not a “Brexit crisis.” Brexit, as you must have noticed, has not happened. What we are seeing is the opposite of a Brexit crisis, an “un-Brexit crisis,” a crisis caused by the refusal of MPs to do what they promised to do when they last stood for election.

As I write, the opposition parties are seeking to overturn the referendum result. They don’t exactly phrase it like that, of course. Instead, they say that they don’t want to leave without a deal. But they know perfectly well that if you rule out a “no-deal Brexit,” you rule out Brexit itself. If “no-deal” is off the table, then all Brussels has to do to keep Britain in the European Union is continue to offer intolerable terms.

On Wednesday afternoon, MPs passed a motion obliging the government to seek as many extensions as the EU wanted. Boris Johnson, the prime minister, responded by calling for a general election. Whereupon Labour, which has been demanding an immediate poll for two years, suddenly went cold on the idea. Under legislation passed in 2010, two-thirds of MPs must agree to an early dissolution of Parliament. On Wednesday evening, Labour and the other opposition parties, looking at the opinion polls, voted against such a dissolution.

Yes, you read that correctly. The parties that have spent the past month accusing Johnson of mounting some sort of coup just voted to prevent him from subjecting his tenure to a national vote.

The House of Commons has thus put itself in a ridiculous position. Pro-EU MPs have voted to keep in office a government they have calculatedly undermined. They have done so for the sole purpose of overturning a referendum result which they had previously promised to uphold. That, my friends, is our political crisis in a nutshell.

Now the good news. Voters are not idiots. They can see what is going on. Sooner or later, probably sooner, there will have to be a general election. The Conservatives have, in effect, deselected 21 of their MPs, including several former ministers, for voting with Labour to prevent Brexit. Although that purge has horrified commentators, most of whom are in awe of the Europhile grandees, it is a necessary prelude to an election campaign that will turn on Brexit. The Tories could hardly fight an election promising to leave the EU while several of their candidates refused to accept that policy. Though the pundits are fainting like affronted matrons, voters appreciate Johnson’s strength of purpose.

In the meantime, the loss of those 21 votes has deprived the government of its majority, making an election before the end of the year almost inevitable.

No one can say how it will turn out, obviously, though the betting markets and the money markets are both predicting a Conservative majority. Such a majority would at last allow Britain to square up to the EU without being undermined.

When British MPs defy public opinion, they often quote Edmund Burke’s 1774 speech to the voters of Bristol, in which he explained that he was their representative, not their delegate. The MPs rarely go on to mention that Bristol booted Burke out at the next election.

My guess is that something similar will happen when polling day comes. Even many remain voters balk at the idea of dragging the argument out any further. I’m going to stick my neck out here: Boris is going to win.

 

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/there-will-still-be-an-election-in-the-uk-and-brexit-will-still-happen

CNN’s “Loony Tunes”? Dem’s “Loony Tunes”? or BOTH TOTAL LOONY TUNES!!

CNN’S PRESIDENTIAL CLIMATE CHANGE WAS INSANE

And the hysteria is getting dangerous.

By David Harsanyi  at the Federalist:

Put it this way: the most benign climate-change plan proposed during CNN’s seven-hour Democratic Party presidential candidate town hall was more authoritarian than anything Donald Trump has ever suggested during his presidency. Democrats were not merely proposing massive societal upheaval but mass coercion.

CNN says it’s a “crisis,” though, so Democrats were free to offer one insane Nostradamus-like prediction after the next. Not only is every weather event now a manifestation of global warming, but Beto O’Rourke says our communities will soon be “uninhabitable,” and Pete Buttigieg says the challenge of warming is on par with World War II, a conflict that took more than 400,000 American lives and tens of millions of others.

None of this hysteria, as far as I can tell, was challenged during those seven hours.

As Joel Pollak notes, at this point climate change “is primarily experienced as a mass hysteria phenomenon,” a collective illusion of a massive threat. Just listen to audience members earnestly asking questions based on the risible premise that we’re on the brink of extinction. It’s really one of the tragedies of our age that so many anxious young people have been brainwashed into believing they live on the cusp of dystopia when, in fact, they’re in the middle of a golden age — an era with less war, sickness, poverty, and suffering than any in history.

When Joe Biden, the “moderate” front-runner, was asked by CNN’s Anderson Cooper if the Green New Deal — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s unifying climate plan that bans all fossil fuels, 99 percent of cars and planes, and meat within the next decade — “goes too far,” or whether it was “unrealistic, promising too much” (“promising,” of course, suggests that GND’s goals are desirable), he answered, “No, no it’s not.”

In fact, the Green New Deal — which also promises to “retrofit” every building in the entire country and provide government-guaranteed jobs, free higher education, and salubrious diets to all Americans — “deserves an enormous amount of credit,” said the front-running candidate of the nation’s serious party.

And though the most effective way to lower carbon emissions — the one that allows us to outpace signees of the vaunted Paris Accord — has been fracking, most Democrats, it seems, now oppose that as well.

Candidate Elizabeth Warren, who’s now adopted Jay Inslee’s plan to force every American to surrender fossil fuel and nuclear energy in 20 years, claims solar panels are the way forward. To put this in perspective, remember that natural gas makes up about 23 percent of our energy consumption while renewables make up about 11 percent. Only 8 percent of that 11 percent is solar energy — much of it both already subsidized and mandated by government.

Americans use about 19.96 million barrels of petroleum products per day. To replace it, we’d have to create millions of unproductive taxpayer-funded jobs, layer every inch of available land with solar panels and windmills, and then pray to Gaia that every day is simultaneously sunny and windy. All for the low cost of $93 trillion.

How? The “norms of democracy” crowd hasn’t yet chimed in on Sen. Kamala Harris’ contention that she would reach across the aisle and demand Republicans pass her plan; and then, if they didn’t, alter the entire U.S. economy via executive action and get rid of the Senate filibuster — which will now be within her power, I guess, since we’re in a crisis.

Then again, when you’re in a crisis, all kinds of ugly things seem reasonable. Take the anti-humanism that’s long been connected to environmentalism.

One town hall audience member asked the bureaucrat Julián Castro if our children should “continue the cycle of family.” Can you imagine being so taken in by a Malthusian panic that you’re seriously pondering whether perpetuating mankind is a good idea?

Abortion, of course, has been a part of environmentalist plans for a long time. When Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said she “thought that at the time Roe (v. Wade) was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of,” she was right.

It’s no accident that Al Gore argued that we “have to have ubiquitous availability of fertility management” in the developing world as a way of controlling population to stop climate change. The Sierra Club and other environmentalist groups have long warned us that too many babies in Africa and Asia will destroy the Earth. “The Population Bomb” is widely accepted by environmentalists, although its chief prophets have long been discredited.

“Human population growth has more than doubled in the past 50 years. The planet cannot sustain this growth,” one CNN audience member told Bernie Sanders, who agreed, promising to back more U.S. funding for abortions in the developing world. Sanders believes women in Asia and Africa should abort their babies to save the world while he shuttles between his main house and one of his two dachas.

Sanders opposes the two greatest antidotes to poverty and suffering: affordable energy and capitalism. And others are now following him.

You might not believe Democrats’ efforts are particularly dangerous, since they’re mostly unworkable. But sooner or later, converts to utopianism are going to start demanding that rhetoric, which is always ratcheting up to new apocalyptic heights, align with policy. That’s dangerous.

David Harsanyi is a Senior Editor at The Federalist. He is the author of First Freedom: A Ride Through America’s Enduring History with the Gun, From the Revolution to Today. Follow him on Twitter.

Abortion Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Bernie Sanders Climate Change CNN CNN Town Hall Democratic Party Elizabeth Warren fossil fuels Global Warming Green New Deal Joe Biden Julián Castro Kamala Harris nuclear energy solar energy

 

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/05/climate-change-hysteria-dangerous/