Columnist Leo McKinstry on why the Brexiteers are gaining ground

Gerard Lyons: "The European Union is like the Titanic. Imagine being in Southampton harbour the day the Titanic set sail. Its size gave the impression of invincibility: safe and secure. It wasn’t. Despite receiving warnings of impending danger it didn’t change course, hit trouble and sank.Because it is huge, some in the UK feel we would be safer and economically stronger in the EU. This is wrong. We now have the opportunity to jump ship to safety. An opportunity we are never likely to have again. Not a leap into the dark, but for those able to look ahead, a move to safety." (Image by Wikipedia)

Leo McKinstry on why the Brexiteers are gaining ground:

The political experts have misjudged every aspect of the referendum fight. Their clichéd thinking led them to believe that the Brexit campaign would be backward-looking and reactionary, whereas the Remain effort would be optimistic and positive. But the reverse is true. 
The Leavers have been upbeat, emphasising the need for Britain to embrace freedom and take her place on the global stage by throwing off the shackles of EU bureaucracy. In contrast, the Remain campaign has been relentlessly gloomy, insular and defeatist. Its profoundly unpatriotic central theme is that Britain is too enfeebled to survive on its own without EU rule or a flood of EU migrants. 
The Remain campaigners can never be positive about the EU because the organisation is a basket case, as dysfunctional as it is undemocratic. Confronted by the evidence of the EU’s comprehensive failure, the Remainers bleat about the need for reform. But, as David Cameron’s humiliating recent deal proved, the EU is not remotely interested in reform, only in the creation of the federal superstate at the expense of traditional nationhood. 
Despite all the scaremongering propaganda, it is clear that truth is beginning to penetrate the electorate. There is now real hope that we could grab the chance to govern ourselves again.

Worth to remember: The same economic "experts" now backing the Remain camp once were staunch supporters of the euro!

The same people, media and organisations that once urged the UK to join the Eurozone are now backing the Remain side:

Of course the referendum on Britain’s EU membership is about much more than economics. It is a vote over how Britain wishes to be governed – by either an elected parliament in Britain or an unelected Commission in Brussels. However, with such economic wisdom supposedly on the side of the Remain camp, it is worth recalling the attitude that Euro-enthusiasts in Britain once had for the euro. The continent’s single currency, needless to say, has been an economic disaster. Yet had the pro-EU crowd had their way, Britain too would have been part of this union of monetary mess.
Among many, it was self-evident that Britain should join the euro. Some of the most influential politicians in the 1990s and 2000s were fervently pro single currency. From Danny Alexander and Paddy Ashdown, to Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson, Ken Clarke, alongside Nick Clegg, Chris Huhne, and Chris Patten. At the same time, supposed key dispensers of financial and business wisdom in the country such as the Financial Times and the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) were also making the case for the euro.

Read the entire article here

Conservative MP Rish Sunak destroys the economic argument for UK remaining in the EU

Rishi Sunak, Conservative MP for Richmond, destroys the economic argument for Remain:

In July 2011, to the clink of Belgian beer glasses, the European Commission toasted a momentous day. 54 years after its founding members gave up the power to negotiate their own trade deals, the EU’s Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with South Korea had come into force; its first ever trade deal with a major developed economy.
The fact that South Korea’s economy is only half the size of Britain’s, that it had taken the EU five years longer to sign the deal than Switzerland, and that – after half a century – the EU still does not have a free trade deal in place with a single top 10 economy was, no doubt, sensibly ignored.
As pundits begin to talk sagely about the Remain campaign having "won the economic argument", it’s worth taking a moment to remember just how dismal the EU’s record of international trade has been.
I’m the son of Indian immigrants and spent my business career working abroad, investing in companies from Silicon Valley to Bangalore. It’s an experience that for me crystallised what EU’s own figures predict: a decade from now, 90 per cent of global demand will be generated from outside Europe.
The scales of the global economy are tipping eastward and, as they do so, the EU’s trade failings are taking an increasingly heavy toll on the UK. The reason for that is this is that Europe’s major economies are primarily focused on the European market. Britain, meanwhile – the only major EU economy that exports more outside the EU than within it – is traditionally far more outward looking, with EU exports accounting for just 13 per cent of our GDP and falling.
The result is that our country’s trade policy is now run by an organisation with fundamentally different trade priorities to our own. For Britain that means too few trade deals, too slowly, with mismatched partners.

Read the entire Telegraph article here

The tide is turning: The British now favour Brexit

Great news for those who favour Brexit:

Two Guardian/ICM polls suggest the British public are in favour of leaving the EU.
Voters have split 52-48 in favour of Brexit whether surveyed online or by phone.
“Our poll rather unhinges a few accepted orthodoxies,” said ICM’s director, Martin Boon. “It is only one poll, but in a rather unexpected reverse of polling assumptions so far, both our phone poll and our online poll are consistent on both vote intentions and on the EU referendum.”
It comes as an ORB poll for the Telegraph showed rise in support for Brexit with 46 per cent backing Leave and 51 per cent for Remain.

Putin´s Russia should be banned from all international sports events

Russia under Putin should be banned from all international sport events after this:

Dozens of Russian athletes at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, including at least 15 medal winners, were part of a state-run doping program, meticulously planned for years to ensure dominance at the Games, according to the director of the country’s antidoping laboratory at the time.

The director, Grigory Rodchenkov, who ran the laboratory that handled testing for thousands of Olympians, said he developed a three-drug cocktail of banned substances that he mixed with liquor and provided to dozens of Russian athletes, helping to facilitate one of the most elaborate — and successful — doping ploys in sports history.

It involved some of Russia’s biggest stars of the Games, including 14 members of its cross-country ski team and two veteran bobsledders who won two golds.

In a dark-of-night operation, Russian antidoping experts and members of the intelligence service surreptitiously replaced urine samples tainted by performance-enhancing drugs with clean urine collected months earlier, somehow breaking into the supposedly tamper-proof bottles that are the standard at international competitions, Dr. Rodchenkov said. For hours each night, they worked in a shadow laboratory lit by a single lamp, passing bottles of urine through a hand-size hole in the wall, to be ready for testing the next day, he said.

By the end of the Games, Dr. Rodchenkov estimated, as many as 100 dirty urine samples were expunged.

None of the athletes were caught doping. More important, Russia won the most medals of the Games, easily surpassing its main rival, the United States, and undermining the integrity of one of the world’s most prestigious sporting events.

“People are celebrating Olympic champion winners, but we are sitting crazy and replacing their urine,” Dr. Rodchenkov said. “Can you imagine how Olympic sport is organized?” 

Corruption pervades everything in Putin´s kleptocracy. This rotten mafia state does not deserve to be part of any civilized international co-operation. That´s why Russia should be banned from the Rio Olympic games. And, of course, FIFA (with its own corruption problems) should not allow Russia to host the football World Cup.

Dutch geologist on global warming hysteria: "anti-science, anti-capitalist, anti-democracy, anti-growth, anti-humanity, anti-progress"

Dutch geologist Gerrit van der Lingen:

"When future historians will be studying the present global mass hysteria about alleged catastrophic man-made global warming (MMGW), they will most likely shake their heads in total disbelief. They may well compare it with other such historic irrational hysterias, like the tulipomania in Holland in the 17th century. […] The belief that human emissions of carbon dioxide cause, or will cause catastrophic global warming is a […] totalitarian belief. It does not allow ‘critical discussion’. Those scientists who try are vilified. Over the years I collected the following abuses: ‘climate change deniers’, ‘cashamplified flat-earth pseudo scientists’, ‘the carbon cartel’, ‘villains’, ‘cranks’, ‘refuseniks lobby’, ‘polluters’, ‘a powerful and devious enemy’, ‘profligates’. The list is endless. […] By saying that the science of climate change is ‘settled’ and not open to further discussion, clearly shows that the belief in man-made global warming is not based on proper science, but is a neo-Marxist, intolerant ideology. It is anti-science, anti-capitalist, anti-democracy, anti-growth, anti-humanity, anti-progress.”

Read the entire book review here

The leftwing case for Brexit

Writer and broadcaster Paul Mason presents the leftwing case for Brexit:

The leftwing case for Brexit is strategic and clear. The EU is not – and cannot become – a democracy. Instead, it provides the most hospitable ecosystem in the developed world for rentier monopoly corporations, tax-dodging elites and organised crime. It has an executive so powerful it could crush the leftwing government of Greece; a legislature so weak that it cannot effectively determine laws or control its own civil service. A judiciary that, in the Laval and Viking judgments, subordinated workers’ right to strike to an employer’s right do business freely.
Its central bank is committed, by treaty, to favour deflation and stagnation over growth. State aid to stricken industries is prohibited. The austerity we deride in Britain as a political choice is, in fact, written into the EU treaty as a non-negotiable obligation. So are the economic principles of the Thatcher era. A Corbyn-led Labour government would have to implement its manifesto in defiance of EU law.          

                                    

And the situation is getting worse. Europe’s leaders still do not know whether they will let Greece go bankrupt in June; they still have no workable plan to distribute the refugees Germany accepted last summer, and having signed a morally bankrupt deal with Turkey to return the refugees, there is now the prospect of that deal’s collapse. That means, if the reported demand by an unnamed Belgian minister to “push back or sink” migrant boats in the Aegean is activated, the hands of every citizen of the EU will be metaphorically on the tiller of the ship that does it. You may argue that Britain treats migrants just as badly. The difference is that in Britain I can replace the government, whereas in the EU, I cannot.
That’s the principled leftwing case for Brexit.