From Richard Wilkinson’s Arthropoda Iconicus, wherein imaginary insects are inspired by popular culture.
Tessellated
at
myjetpack
Anthony Coughlan
An open Letter to anti-Brexit Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole from Anthony Coughlan, director of the strongly Euroseptic National Platform EU Research and Information Centre.
Dear Fintan,
You conclude an article (Boris Johnson is the fool who would play the king, June 18) attacking Boris Johnson in the “Irish Times” by asking “Who better to speak for a reckless and decadent ruling class for whom everything is desperate but nothing is serious?”
This implies that you believe that the British “ruling class” backs Brexit, but is that really so? And are “reckless” and “decadent” really the apt adjectives?
I would have thought that the real situation is that what one might broadly term the British “ruling class” has up to now been predominantly supportive of “Remain”, but that the majority of UK citizens who voted to take back control of their law-making from Brussels by backing “Leave” in the 2016 referendum gave democratic legitimacy to the minority of the ruling class which favours Brexit.
It is this popular democratic vote that legitimises Brexit and it is presumably the reason why your own newspaper and many others who do not like Brexit want a second referendum in the hope that it will overturn the result of the first, as was done here with Nice Two in 2002 and Lisbon Two in 2009.
The economic side of the British ruling class – namely the City, the CBI, High Finance and Big Business generally – overwhelmingly backed “Remain” in the 2016 referendum and largely do that still.
The political side – namely Prime Minister David Cameron’s Government, most Tory Ministers and MPs at the time, plus their Blairite opposite numbers in the Labour Party, plus the senior British Civil Service, were also “Remainers” and many still are, although the more democratically minded among them realise now that, with the departure of Theresa May, they must accept and implement the referendum result or else see the electoral destruction of the Tory Party, the principal party of Britain’s “ruling class”.
Of course one might also say that Britain’s ruling class is to some extent divided on the EU and always has been.
When the UK first applied to join the then EEC in 1961 Labour’s Hugh Gaitskell criticized the Tory Harold Macmillan for proposing to abandon “a thousand years of history”.
Later, in the 1973-5 period, the Tory Enoch Powell and Labour’s Tony Benn opposed Edward Heath and Harold Wilson as they brought Britain into the EEC and kept it there.
I shared No-side platforms with the Tory Sir Richard Body and Labour’s Peter Shore and Tony Benn at various meetings in London during Harold Wilson’s referendum on staying in the then EEC in 1975 – the first ever UK referendum – when two-thirds of those voting voted to remain in the EEC.
At that time that there were only two major British journals backing the No side – the communist party “Morning Star” and the Tory weekly “Spectator”. The rest of the media, from “The Sun” to the “Financial Times”, strongly favoured staying in the EEC.
As I expect you know, it was the USA that originally fathered Eurofederalism. The first supranational community, the European Coal and Steel Community of 1951, was pushed by the Americans as an economic underpinning of NATO in Europe and to reconcile France to German rearmament at the start of the Cold War.
The CIA financed the European Movement for years. Later John F. Kennedy pushed Harold Macmillan into applying to join the then EEC following the 1956 Suez debacle.
In so far as the British “ruling class” had independent ambitions at that time I would say that it hoped that by joining the EEC it would either divide France from Germany or else be co-opted by France and Germany into a triumvirate that would help run “Yurrup”, as Edward Heath used call it, together.
Disillusionment at the failure to achieve either of those objectives is surely one of the elements in Tory rejection of the supranational EU “project”.
May I respectfully suggest that “Irish Times” readers deserve a more sophisticated analysis of the reasons for the shift in British “ruling class” and popular attitudes between 1975 and 2016 than to ascribe that change to press columns by Boris Johnson.
And what is the Irish Government’s contribution to the current state of Anglo-Irish relations?
As Ray Bassett has pointed out, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s intransigence on the issue of a time-limit to the North-South ”backstop” in the hope that this could be used to scupper Brexit altogether, has helped to get rid of “Remainer” Prime Minister Theresa May and hand the leadership of the Tory Party to one of the Brexiteers., while damaging underlying Anglo-Irish relations for possibly a long time.
Can our own “ruling class” not give better leadership to the country than this?
Yours sincerely,
Anthony Coughlan, Director, The National Platform EU Research and Information Centre
FIGHT!
Meanwhile…
Luse writes:
This year’s Reith Lectures are by Jonathan Sumption. In the 4th and final lecture on constitution and whether or not the UK would be better off with a written constitution (He argues it wouldn’t, Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish devolution would have been harder to implement.) he ends as with all the lectures with a question and answer section with the audience, resulting in the following piece of beauty. Page 9 at this link, in which Mark Reckless, yes the one and the same is put back in his box.Considering the scaremongering nonsense that was written to Fintan O’Toole, (above) I thought it might be an additional addendum…
Ah here.
This morning.
The summit of Seahan, Dublin/Wicklow mountains.
Archaeologist Neil Jackman tweetz:
There are a number of megalithic monuments on the summit. Unfortunately the ‘Druid Order’ have recently damaged the large cairn by quarrying it to make a stupid shelter that they handily signed.
The absolute gonks. (I’ve reported it to National Monuments). Please don’t screw around with 5000 year old tombs.
The utter irony of them writing ‘Please keep tidy’ on a site they damaged I’ve also picked up a fair amount of litter around there too. I’m going to build a Wicker man.
Yikes.
Cardinal Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster
The Archbishop of Westminster was focused on protecting the church’s reputation over the welfare of children, an inquiry into child sexual abuse has found.
Cardinal Vincent Nichols is the current leader of Roman Catholics in England and Wales and was archbishop of Birmingham between 2000 and 2009.
More than 130 allegations of child sex abuse have been made against 78 people associated with the archdiocese since the mid-1930s, but the true scale of offending is likely to be far higher, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) concluded.
The panel found the church had “repeatedly failed” to alert police to allegations, and said the consequences of those failings “cannot be overstated“.
The Roman Catholic Church Case Study: Archdiocese of Birmingham Investigation Report
Archbishop of Westminster put church’s reputation before children, says abuse inquiry (Sky News)
Pic: Sky
Meanwhile…
Gulp.
This morning/afternoon.
Ireland’s European Commissioner Phil Hogan meets Pope Francis at the Vatican.
Fontaines DC – Sha Sha Sha
Fancy a day at the circus? Then let Brian Chatten and his crew be your guide.
Directed by Hugh Mulhern, the new video from the Dublin post-punk tyros sees them larking about in costume at Duffy’s Circus amidst the acrobats and the bikers. A splendid time is guaranteed for all.
‘Sha Sha Sha’, whose riff has echoes of The Clash and The Cure, can be found on their album ‘Dogrel’, which has been generating a serious buzz across the Atlantic.
Nick says: Bring on the dancing horses
Hot Wheels
at
Behold: the Aston Martin Valhalla Coupe – a hypercar developed alongside the (similarly Norse god-themed) Valkyrie.
Powered by a F1-inspired hybrid twin-turbo V6 and designed to compete with Ferrari’s SF90 Stradale and McLaren’s next P1, 500 of these mid-engined track rockets will be produced (with a possible convertible option to follow).
An image of the magnetic field at the centre of the Milky Way taken using a specialised HAWC+ camera by NASA’s 747 mounted observatory SOFIA. To wit:
HAWC+ maps magnetism by observing polarized infrared light emitted by elongated dust grains rotating in alignment with the local magnetic field.
Now at our Milky Way’s center is a supermassive black hole with a hobby of absorbing gas from stars it has recently destroyed. Our galaxy’s black hole, though, is relatively quiet compared to the absorption rate of the central black holes in active galaxies.
The featured image gives a clue as to why — a surrounding magnetic field may either channel gas into the black hole — which lights up its exterior, or forces gas into an accretion-disk holding pattern, causing it to be less active — at least temporarily.
Inspection of the featured image — appearing perhaps like a surreal mashup of impasto art and gravitational astrophysics — brings out this telling clue by detailing the magnetic field in and around a dusty ring surrounding Sagittarius A*, the black hole in our Milky Way’s center.
An Garda Síochána; Garda cars for Pride this weekend
Yesterday.
On RTÉ’s Liveline.
A gay former Garda, going by the name of Matthew, told presenter Joe Duffy that he was dismissed from the guards in the 1980s without any explanation.
He said, in 1982, after the murder of RTE worker Charles Self, whom he knew, he was told to go to Dublin Castle and present himself to a superintendent.
There, Matthew was told that he was being investigated for conduct “which would bring discredit on the force”.
Matthew, who was 22 at the time, then had to give a statement and his fingerprints were taken. He was also asked if he knew Charles Self, who was also gay.
Matthew said he himself wasn’t ask if he was gay.
He said he was subsequently interviewed in Pearse Street Garda Station and fingerprinted again.
He said in June 1982 – two days before he was due to be attested – a sergeant and an inspector arrived at the parade room where Matthew was with his colleagues and he was ordered out of the room.
He recalled:
“My colleagues were shocked.
“I was given ten minutes to strip and get out of the station. No reason, nothing.
“I left the station, my sergeant directed me, well, he advised me – he said ‘don’t leave, stay where you are, come in and parade for duty tomorrow night, I’ll fight this’.
“But I hadn’t….I was like a rabbit caught in the headlights. I came home and the following day or the day after, the local gardai came down to remove any further items of Garda property – you would have had another uniform, you’d have a winter uniform, you’d have a grey coat, baton, notebook, torches, things like that.
“And they came down, they removed all the items. And, I just, my life, really the following ten years, spiralled downwards.
“I started to get myself together after five years and I wrote to the Garda Commissioner asking to be reinstated and I got a letter back to say they weren’t going to reverse their decision at this stage.”
Matthew said he has never received an explanation for this dismissal.
He added that he sought a copy of his personal file from Garda HQ in 2000/2001 but his request was declined.
He was told he could view his file, while being supervised, at Garda HQ but he declined the invited.
He then wrote again to the human resources department of An Garda Síochána in 2014. He also wrote to GSOC.
Eventually he got a redacted personal file in August 2014 – with the unredacted sections showing he was an exemplary guard.
He said he’s written to the Garda Commissioner and the Minister for Justice Charlie Flanagan but has been “stonewalled”.
He said:
“I look on Twitter and I see the Pride march next Saturday, they’re going to have two cars bedecked with the Pride flag and I mean, it’s only 36 years ago, 35 years ago, I was treated like a pariah.”
He added:
“This is one thing I need closure on. Why? Why?”
“…and the charade of having the two cars in the Pride parade. It’s a charade, it’s window-dressing.”
Matthew told Mr Duffy he’s seeking to obtain his full file unredacted; he wants a reason for his sacking; and he wants an apology.
Listen back in full here
