Salut!

Rishi, Boris, Keir etc: those wacky Brexit positions in full

Understanding Brexit and all the different positions people take on this most important subject can be tricky. Here is a cut-out-and-keep guide 

 

With renewed thanks to the Danish cartoonist Jens Hage 

Salut!’s Christmas Day message: glad tidings amid the gloom

 

Today is a day to be enjoyed.

And Salut! hopes its small band of readers - the folk music site Salut! Live gets many, many more and might even entertain you - have a great Christmas Day.

My pal Pete Sixsmith foregoes Sunderland games each Christmas to show there is professional life after a teaching career 

 

There are things we can try to forget for one day.

Forget the attacks ministers and media cheerleaders have made on ordinary people, most of them performing important duties of behalf of everyone, for attempting to defend or improve working conditions and negotiate fairer pay.

Forget, if we can for a day, Putin and his squalid invasion, a Hitleresque adventure he crazily justifies as countering neo-Nazis in Ukraine.

Forget the incompetence, misconduct and dubious relationship with the truth that have characterised a good part of the Tories’ 12 years in power. The Government’s default disclaimer - ´´global headwinds’´, ie the pandemic and war - diverts blame from its own failures and the role of Brexit, which makes every problem others face that much worse for the UK.

Forget Sir Keir Starmer’s ploy of pretending the stench of Brexit can somehow be turned by his magic wand into the sweetest of scents. 

Actually, don’t forget and certainly don’t forgive any of that.

But do try to make the most of the festive season, notably today and the New Year revelries. And remember the good things: the flawed wonder that is the NHS and its magnificent staff, people in public and other essential services, volunteers at homeless refuges and food banks, all those giving their time, effort, skills and sometimes their lives to make the world a better place.

Salut! wishes you all a happy Christmas and the best the new year can bring.

 

Macron's 2022 nears end with comforting embraces for Mbappe, mixed balance sheet for France

 

 

Where else but Qatar to start a review of France and Emmanuel Macron's year? The mix of emotions on show at the end of a thrilling World Cup final no one really deserved to lose offered a useful metaphor. My thanks to the editor of The National for consenting to reproduction of my work here ...  

 

Amid high drama in Qatar, the faces of Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappe firing the imagination of a watching world, an eventful year for France was reflected in other images capturing the changing moods of President Emmanuel Macron.

In Mr Macron’s expressions could be seen unbridled exhilaration at France’s comeback from being two goals down, the despair of ultimate defeat, grudging respect for the Argentine opposition and warm consolation for the deflated players, Mbappe in particular.

France was no longer top of the world in football. After the trophy-winning World Cup exploits of 1998 and 2018, finishing second in Doha was a slip from heady heights mirrored in at least one other aspect of the President’s experience of 2022.

 

UK policy: nurses should shiver and starve to defeat Putin

Sad but true: many Conservatives say or maybe would say if asked that they naturally support - as a fundamental democratic right - the right of workers to withdraw labour. I have never met a Conservative who supports this or that strike ... my analysis for The National

 

In a world seemingly imagined by Nadhim Zahawi, chairman of Britain’s ruling Conservative party, Vladimir Putin sits glumly at his preposterously long table in the Kremlin.

 

The news from London is bleak. Just as Mr Zahawi had urged, British nurses have accepted a pay offer they regard as desultory, thus sending a “clear message” to the Russian president that his warmongering, and weaponising of energy supply,are doomed to failure.

 

Mr Putin realises the game is up. His “special military operation” – or, as others see it, murderous invasion of neighbouring sovereign territory – must end forthwith, whatever the damage to personal and national pride.

 

Brexit and the Ukipification of Labour: Starmer own goal or sound tactics?

 

Brexit may be seen more and more for what it is, an unmitigated disaster, but its power to corrupt remains strong.

We've had Lord Frost and Liz Truss, so vocal in condemning the economic absurdity of leaving the EU before the referendum, hard Brexiters afterwards. Boris Johnson wrote opposing versions of a pre-referendum column, one pro-Remain, the other for Leave. I suspect BoJo’s reasoned preference was for the former but that ambition easily swayed him in the direction of the latter and the company of Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg, IDS, Gove, Britain First, the EDL and - overseas -Trump, Putin, Wilders, and a Le Pen or two or three.

Jeremy Hunt? An emergency budget in which he talks about Putin, Covid, his own party's wretched economic gambles and "global headwinds". No mention of the other culprit (which he, too, knew all along would cause misery}.

And now Sir Keir Starmer. leader of His Majesty's Opposition. First he imposed a new form of omerta on his party, leaving senior colleagues in no doubt that criticism of Brexit, often enough even mention of it, was taboo. Ambition again; he wants to be PM and he worries about his red wall of voters who switched from lifelong Labour to duped (or xenophobic) Conservative because BoJo was Getting Brexit Done.

In this Comment piece for The National - which, according to house style about foreign titles, has him as Mr not Sir - I explore the pros and cons of the new pro-Brexit Starmer stance ...

 

 

 

Chris McAndrew