Two hundred and forty-two years ago, meeting in the Pensylvania State House, the 13 North American colonies of Britain declared themselves to be independent states.
They never looked back and all this time later they are still celebrating that action as the right decision.
So, on the 4th of July 2018, we wish the USA all the very best, and of course an especially happy Independence Day to Munguin’s friends over there. (We have many American readers, but Danny and Jon are the main contributors, and we are grateful for their input, so special words of thanks to them).
The current president is just a blip. (Well he’s obviously a lot more things, but what I mean is he is temporary.) Hopefully, though, people will remember what a clown he was and how the rest of the world laughed at him and they will resolve to vote more carefully in future. Mrs May can be grateful that whilst she is an utter laughing stock, she is infinitely less important in the scheme of things than he is… and Donald has certainly “Trumped” her as the world-class eejit. She’s merely a third-rate eejit.
Anyway, forget about him tomorrow, Americans. Enjoy the fireworks and the feasts and have a great day.
Hopefully, in the not too distant future, the boot will be on the other foot and our friends in the States will be wishing us the same thing.
**********
Talking of Trump, Justice Secretary, Humza Yousaf wrote to the Treasury asking that they pay for any security expenses of having Trump in our country. They invited him, not us. He has no official business in Scotland.
He has received an answer in the affirmative from the Rt Hon Truss. Of course, it seems to me to be particularly bad manners to write to someone by their first name, and sign with your full name, and even worse, your style. And what is all the numbering of paragraphs about?
Who on earth does that?
MUNGUIN'S NEW REPUBLIC 
But Ruth and co will still be willing to sell out Scottish businesses, farmers and consumers for a trade deal with the Orange one. Indeed, should he not get a 12th July invitation ? Wouldn’t even need to wear a sash to fit in.
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Oh yes. She’s changed her tune now.
As she always does when the Maybot (registered trade mark) tells her too.
I seem to remember that she about turned on anything Cameron told her to as well.
She’s not really a departmental manager at all… more a sort of deputy assistant under charge hand
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Re Trump in Scotland (doesn’t have the same ring as Nixon in China, does it): we note that English Justice Secretary Truss says in her letter to Oor Humza, “As you are aware, policing is a devolved matter in Scotland. However, on an exceptional basis …”.
It is good that Truss reaffirms that policing is a devolved matter, however snotty the form of words used. I am less happy about the “exceptional basis”, but my gloss on it is that this is a bit of a*rse-covering.
The way I take it is that when obnoxious Tory political or Home Office person A says to Humza, “Policing is a devolved matter, so you have to pay for looking after the Great Orange Russian Stooge and Pal of Treeza while he is adding lustre to your second-rate Jockanese shores”, Humza responds by saying “Policing is a devolved matter, as I am perfectly well aware, thank you very much, so I decide as a devolved matter that I’m not going to play ball at all or lift any finger whatsoever in aid of his visit unless you at least cough up the money. We know you’re going to, not least because you don’t want another fight with us Scots on your hands right now. We don’t want Trump, we didn’t invite him, and we’d rather that piece of orange White supremacist dogsh*it wasn’t coming anywhere near us at all.”
Consequently: Tory political person B (Truss) says to Humza, “As you are aware, policing is a devolved matter in Scotland”, making it sound as if Humza has had to be told this because he is some sort of idiot, and “However, on an exceptional basis…”, meaning she makes it sound as if it is only by Their great grace and favour that any dosh at all is going to be coughed up, although what she is actually saying, through gritted teeth, is: “OK boyo, you’ve won this one but enjoy your pathetic little victory it while it lasts.”.
The fact is – assuming the Schloß Freeman Diplomatic and Legal Response Team’s scenario-modelling skills are up to scratch – Humza had Them over a barrel and They know it.
By the way, excellent photo of Ms. Truss – she’s really got potential as a good pantomime boy, doesn’t she? Buttons, or even a Prince. She even manages to carry off that horsehair wig as if it’s almost natural.
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Spirit of Full Disclosure: I wrote sumfink like that ^^^ in the National earlier. Which doesn’t make it any more or less true, of course.
And how could I have failed to congratulate our American friends on their Independence Day? I am remiss! I also miss watching the fireworks down the Hudson from my apartment building way back when; vast clouds of gunpowder smoke, fire-fighting boats pumping jets of water for all they were worth, the whole choreographed to music you could listen to over the radio. Lovely.
It was during one of those fireworks displays that I realized that we humming beans are programmed to go “Oooh!” and “Aaah!” at fireworks in a weird sort of way that makes us all go either “Oooh!” or “Aaah!” all at once in unison, not one or t’other randomly. Listen when you get a chance, and you will see.
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Thanks for the 4th of July good wishes Ed. I’ve never been in one of the big eastern cities on Independence Day to watch one of the REALLY BIG displays. New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, etc, do it up in grand style. Sounds like you had a great view of the New York City display from your apartment building. 🙂
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I did indeed, Danny. Alas, it wasn’t too long before the rent was pushed up from the merely unaffordable to the downright stratospheric… here it is on Google Maps. http://tinyurl.com/ycdfjjgl
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WOW Ed……I’ve never known ANYBODY who can afford to live in Manhattan….much less Greenwich Village. I do have a friend….an older family friend actually……who has a rent controlled apartment in Flatbush in Brooklyn.
Apparently the big Macy’s Fourth of July display is on the East River now, but there’ll still be fireworks on the Hudson……or so says the Times.
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LOL. It’s good that we had someone there on the spot, so now we know exactly what happened. 🙂
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How many people does it take to carry her skirts?
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Loads… but no expense is spared for this kind of thing.
She’s moved now. She’s at the Treasury, so I don;t think she gets to wear daft robes any more… but who knows?
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Shame on you, Ed – I think Ms Truss makes a fine figure of a man in that fetching costume. Egad, if she only had some handcuffs and a whip! Seriously though, I wonder if she’s called Truss because she’s so good at supporting all those Tory bollocks.
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Andimac, you have a very palpable point, sir!
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She probably does. She’s a Tory.
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Maybe she’ll stun us all by breaking out into a spine-tingling rendition of “I am the very model of modern major-general”.
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Aye but maybe not so modern, Ed. I was looking again at Ms Truss’s costume and thought how wonderfully 18thC it was – braided coat, knee britches, buckled shoon, jabot, lace cuffs. She even appears to have a little blackamoor to hold up her train and presumably the po-faced lackey further back is carrying her snuff-box and tricorne hat. How very symbolic it all is of 21stC modern global Britain. Gadzooks, sirrah, I must fly – me sedan chair is at the door!
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Global Britain… The Empire Strikes….
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Maybe she won’t.
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I’m just reading between the lines here Tris but WHO exactly is Mr. Tangerines coming to visit in this corrupt broken bankrupt country?
I only ask because for days now I keep seeing more and more headlines in the paper reviews about Civil war in the Tory party. I’m deeply concerned that by the time Mr. Tangerines arrives at Heathrow there may be a vacancy sign on the front door of 10 Downing Street.😂
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This is true. Until things become clearer, Munguinites are advised to address all their letters to the Prime Minister thusly: “The Occupant, 10 Downing Street, London SW1A 2AA”.
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LOL. I think Ed has that about right, Arbroath.
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Thanks to Tris and everyone at Munguin’s Republic for the good wishes for the 4th of July. May you be celebrating Independence Day in Scotland before much more time passes. Trump is indeed a temporary aberration, and I’m glad to hear that Scotland will not be paying his security expenses while he is at his posh golf club or whatever it is he intends to do.
Fireworks are already filling the sky in the evenings…..the modern form of the celebration called for by John Adams in a letter to his wife Abigail dated July 3, 1776. Full independence from The Crown (instead of a simple petition to the King for redress of grievances) had been moved and approved by the Second Continental Congress on the previous day. John Adams therefore thought that July 2 would be revered as the day of American independence, but that was not to be. Americans in fact celebrate what happened the NEXT day, on the 4th, when the text of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence was finally adopted.
So it’s on July 4th that we celebrate a day as John Adams proclaimed to Abigail:
“I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”
A video filmed in the room in Philadelphia, where the Second Continental Congress met in the old Pennsylvania State House, now named Independence Hall: (Low sound volume…..Subtitles Available)
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Thank you, Danny.
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Shouldn’t it be Happy Separation Day,or happy Grievance day?
We probably have more grievances with Westminster than the USA ever had.
Can’t see May and her fellow grovelling Brexiteers accusing the Orange one of that however.
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Give us a trade deal…. PLEASE. We’ll do anything. You want prostitutes, you got them.
You want water sports… just say.
You want your own island off Scotland… here you are…
Health Service… there you go.
Grrrrrr….
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https://www.opendemocracy.net/peter-geoghegan/vote-leave-trying-to-bury-bad-news
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…and of course the last time people got poisoned around Porton Down we were just about to have the Cambridge Analytica revelations hitting the press.
How stupid do they think people are?
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Vestas
Well ! 🤡
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Conan
Tom Harris says on his column vote leave may have broke the rules .
Er ! No they broke the law
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LOL… Just like McVey MAY HAVE UNINTENTIONALLY MISLED MPs when she lied through her teeth about Universal Benefit.
That woman is for burning in hell alongside Thatcher.
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https://tinyurl.com/yb7fe8az
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Thanks, Dougie! My answer is No. No, wild horses couldn’t drag the words “I told you so” out of me.
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eddjasfreeman,
Of course not. Heaven forfend!
🙂
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You’re so modest, Ed.
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Yep, it adds up.
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Well, I never! Who’d ever have thunk it?
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Well, on a personal basis, we could imprison him in a high security jail on Rockall. His high security jail would probably be crowd funded in a nano-second.
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I was thinking that maybe he could be put into orbit like that Tesla of Elon Musk’s, but there’s far too much space junk already. Not that Teslas are junk. No. Far from it.
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eddjasfreeman,
I found this – it is lengthy but, ahem, interesting – see what you make of it.
“The Pivot
By Charlie Stross
Something huge is happening in the UK right now, and I wonder where it’s going.
Brexit requires no introduction at this point. Nor, I think, do the main UK media players. With the exception of two newspapers (The Daily Mirror and The Guardian) the national papers have been uniformly pro-Brexit to the extent of attacking national institutions seen as being soft on Brexit. The BBC news programs have also broadly pushed a pro-Brexit line, from Question Time (which gave Nigel Farage a semi-permanent slot but not once invited a guest speaker from the Green Party or the SNP—both pro-Remain by policy), to the Today Program (Radio 4’s news flagship), whose John Humphrys pushes a hard Brexit line.
Although the referendum was framed as advisory and limited to leaving the European Union, it was received as a mandate by the Conservative hard right and their hard-left opposite numbers in Labour (who have their own reasons for disliking what they see as a neoliberal right-wing institution), and the current in-cabinet debate appears to be over whether to leave all European institutions immediately, or to provide an adjustment period for leaving organizations like the Customs Union (which wasn’t on the ballot in the first place).
Here in the real world the drumbeat of bad economic news continues. Jaguar Land Rover to move production of Discovery from UK to Slovakia, because of course they’re owned by Tata, most of their output is exported, and why would an Indian company want to invest in a UK beset by pre-Brexit uncertainty? UK manufacturing output is falling at its fastest rate since 2012. And the rest of the economy is doing so well that Poundworld (the equivalent of a US dollar store chain) has collapsed and is in bankruptcy administration.
Then, last week, something happened. Or several somethings. (From the outside it’s hard to be sure.)
One of those somethings was the retirement of Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre and his replacement by Mail on Sunday editor Georgie Greig, a pro-European journalist. Newspaper owner Lord Rothermere remains the same, but an unattributed source described Greig’s appointment as part of a process of “detoxifying the Daily Mail”.
Next, the Murdoch press began an extraordinary about-face on Brexit. For about a year now Carol Cadwalladr of The Guardian has been digging into Cambridge Analytica, the Leave.EU campaign, and possible links to Russian state agencies and oligarchs. These links were known to some pro-leave journalists as much as two years ago, but they’re only now coming to public view. Aaron Banks is one of the main bankers of the Brexit campaign and appears to have very cordial relations with the Russian government, not to mention half a dozen Russian gold mines; he’s been called to testify before a House of Commons committee tomorrow and last week was refusing to attend. This week he appears to be on the back foot, with The Times going after him Revealed: Brexit backer Arron Banks’s golden Kremlin connection. Indeed, The Observer reports that Arron Banks ‘met Russian embassy officials multiple times before Brexit vote’. The newspaper goes on to say, “Towards the end of last year, Banks issued a statement saying his contacts with “the Russians” consisted of “one boozy lunch” at the Russian embassy. Documents seen by the Observer, suggest a different version of events.” (Note that Banks has a net worth in the ~£100M range: you don’t print anything about him in an English newspaper without getting a legal opinion first.) Oh, and the Fair Vote Project is going after him in court in the US, following allegations that two companies owned by Banks may have illegally exported information on British voters to the USA (in violation of UK data protection rules) for purposes of data mining (Banks had negotiated with Cambridge Analytica prior to this move).
Here’s a summary of what we know so far, by way of Vice: verything you need to know about the bombshell report linking Russia to Brexit. Shorter version: Banks had extensive meetings with the Russian ambassador to the UK, who is also named on the indictment of ex-Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos; Banks also passed contact information for Trump’s transition team to the Russians. So he’s a critical link in the Brexit/Trump/Russia connection.
He’s not the only Brexiteer in trouble in the press. Hedge fund manager and Brexiteer Crispin Odey is accused of shorting the British stock market to the tune of £500M, effectively betting that Brexit will cause the market to fall and these companies to do badly. Brexit ultra and possible Conservative party leadership challenger Jacob Rees-Mogg is under siege by the formerly-friendly Daily Mail: Mogg’s Moscow Millions: Brexiteer’s firm has poured a fortune into a string of Russian companies with links to the Kremlim but has invested next to nothing in Britain. And finally Neo-Nazi MEP Nigel Farage’s EU pension is to be held in escrow pending the completion of ongoing fraud investigations (and, as the icing on the cake, apparently the FBI have named him as a person of interest in their ongoing investigation into Russian slush money and false news).
Let me put forward a hypothesis:
In the real world (outside the pages of fiction) only two types of conspiracy generally take place: cover-up and collusion. A cover-up generally happens when several people or groups stand to lose money or be politically embarrassed if an uncomfortable truth becomes public knowledge. See, for example, the Home Office shredding of historical records relating to the Windrush scandal lest they embarrass the Prime Minister, who was the Home Office minister who brought in the hostile environment immigration policy. And collusion generally takes place when a group of individuals or organizations stand to benefit from a course of action.
Brexit was a classic example of a collusion conspiracy. Many of the named politicians and businessmen above stand to gain millions of pounds from a hard Brexit that causes the British stock market to fall. Others stand to make millions from juicy investment opportunities they were offered in Russia. We cannot know for certain what the quid pro quo for those investment deals were at this time, but I strongly suspect that support for Brexit (and more general socially-authoritarian right-wing policies) was part of it.
And now we’re seeing a rival collusion conspiracy surface. Not all billionaires stand to profit from seeing the remains of British industry sink beneath the waves, and not all of them are in the pocket of the Kremlin’s financial backers. There are a bunch of very rich, rather reclusive men (and a handful of women) who probably thought, “well, let’s sit back and see where this thing leads, for now” about 18 months ago. And now they can see it leading right over a cliff, and they are unhappy, and they have made their displeasure known on the golf course and in the smoke-filled rooms, and the quiet whispering campaign has finally turned heads at the top of the media empires.
If I’m right, then over the next four to eight weeks the wrath of the British press is going to fall on the heads of the Brexit lobby with a force and a fury we haven’t seen in a generation. There may be arrests and criminal prosecutions before this sorry tale is done: I’d be unsurprised to see money-laundering investigations, and possibly prosecutions under the Bribery Act (2010), launched within this time frame that will rumble on for years to come.
Even if the momentum behind Brexit proves un-stoppable at this point, the Remain faction—in the shape of the corporate and political power groups who stand to lose their fortunes as a result—will seek revenge.
And in the large, I think it’s no coincidence at all that this broke out in the same week as Donald Trump’s epic tantrum at the G7 summit.
Posted by Charlie Stross at 16:54 on June 11, 2018″
Hadn’t quite realized it was that long. Still, he makes his case pretty persuasively.
Love the guys books.
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Around about now, his prediction:
“If I’m right, then over the next four to eight weeks the wrath of the British press is going to fall on the heads of the Brexit lobby with a force and a fury we haven’t seen in a generation. There may be arrests and criminal prosecutions before this sorry tale is done…”
I think he is right. I think that these are ‘interesting times’.
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I came to the same conclusions as Stross, though I haven’t combed through the article carefully to elaborate on points with which I disagree or would want to nuance differently.
On the subject of the British press, though – I have no respect left for their journalistic ethics. The default position, I suspect, will be to admit there was interference in the poll but deny it had any effect on the overall outcome. That position will be indefensible, but that will not stop them saying it: this was the position taken by Trump defenders on the Russian interference in the American elections, and even though a retired head of the CIA (I think – Brennan?) came out and said that with Trump’s victory hanging on a total of about 80,000 votes in a few swing states, of course the Russian campaign affected the result. However, the right-wing press, even the not particularly Trump-supporting titles and channels, have reacted to that by – ignoring it completely.
In the UK national press, the Guardian and the Independent will run with it, I think. The Barclay brothers / Telegraph – they may have become unhappy with the handling of Brexit, but I suspect they will not want to rock the boat and alienate their core readership.
So no, I have my doubts. I don’t think the UK press are going to be all over it. After all, to do so would be to risk exposing all the Tories’ other financial jiggery-pokery – so I don’t think they’re going to risk opening that particular can of worms. They would likely cause the Westminster regime to fall apart, with another general election as the likely result, and Labour at least as divided as the Tories and just as incompetent, so the mood will likely be – better stick with the devil they know.
I would love to be wrong.
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That will be interesting…
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🙂
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