Brexit - The UK leaves the EU
- Thread starter Touring Mars
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This is total nonsense.
I would be considerably more concerned about what Michel Barnier thinks of extending Article 50 than what some conspiracy theorists might believe about the level of influence a couple of Brexit campaigners have.
The fact is, however, that even if Article 50 is extended, that in itself doesn't solve the problem of what happens if no deal has been ratified by the end of the extension period. Whether any one EU member may not agree to extend Article 50 (either now or later) is really a moot point.
One coud argue (and much more convincingly) that No Brexit was always the goal. The fact is that the UK Parliament can still avert No Deal by either agreeing a deal (very unlikely) or by revoking Article 50. No Deal, on the other hand, can only happen if neither of these things is actioned.
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I know who she is, and my comments were not limited to her - but she does have it slightly wrong.
Extending Article 50 is not the only option, apparently... it is possible that the UK and the EU can agree to shift the date of exit by a qualified majority, thus no one member state could block that.
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/...-still-get-her-brexit-deal-through-parliament
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- 20,681
- TenEightyOne
- TenEightyOne
An amendment has been proposed to block a second referendum, at this time the Speaker has not ruled on its inclusion.
Dotini
(Banned)
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"We should be heeding Selmy. When Barristan the Bold tells you to run, a wise man laces up his boots."
—Gerris Drinkwater to Quentyn Martell
[58] A Dance with Dragons, Chapter 60, The Spurned Suitor. (by George RR Martin)
When Battle Commander Cadwalladr says you've been penetrated, what do you do then?
—Gerris Drinkwater to Quentyn Martell
[58] A Dance with Dragons, Chapter 60, The Spurned Suitor. (by George RR Martin)
When Battle Commander Cadwalladr says you've been penetrated, what do you do then?
Sort of.
This conspiracy theorist is the one who wrote your link.
Award winning investigative journalist is a conspiracy theorist, because she has it (in your opinion), slightly wrong?
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No, but she is (deliberately or otherwise) peddling a conspiracy theory.
In any case, she is wrong if she contends that Italy can or would unilaterally block an extension to Article 50 or a postponement of the Brexit date.
It is true, however, that the UK cannot simply vote to delay Brexit and expect it to happen automatically - it has always been the case that such a decision would require agreement from the EU in some form or another.
Interesting.
While there is a way to navigate around Italy potentially blocking an extension, actually getting the extension requires work that has yet to be done, and would require another referendum (unless I'm not understanding it correctly?).
An unsurprising remark.
- 20,681
- TenEightyOne
- TenEightyOne
That's correct, all the EU votes are by "simple majority" meaning the agreement of 15 of 28 council members is required. There are no plans to require a unanimous vote, that's the only case in which every council member has an effective veto capability.
It was to point out that you are in fact grossly inflating the truth.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-guardian/
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-observer/
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Getting an extension of any description is by no means a formality, hence why MPs should be very cautious about assuming otherwise. It also needs to be remembered that leaving the EU on March 29th 2019 is written into UK law - it is the legal default, and thus legislation is required to prevent that from happening. Unfortunately, an extension to Article 50 may also be needed at this late stage to allow for that legislation to be passed in time.
Ironically, while granting any extension to the Article 50 process may be entirely in the hands of the EU, the circumstances by which an extension may be requested lies entirely in the hands of the UK. And that's a problem, because it remains possible that UK MPs will vote against extending Article 50 tomorrow (although I think that is unlikely) and the EU have made it clear that any request to extend Article 50 must be accompanied with an explanation of why it is being requested. As I already said, the EU are reluctant to consider an extension if the only reason is to buy time, because it is just delaying the inevitable.
Reading between the lines of what Barnier said earlier today, the EU are willing to extend Article 50 or allow Brexit to be delayed if the UK has either already agreed to ratify the Withdrawal Agreement (unlikely) or has stated a desire to either revoke Article 50 (also unlikely) or has passed legislation to allow for a second public vote of some description. The latter option seems to be what they are hoping for, but this too could be ruled out if a motion like that posted by @TenEightyOne to block a possible second referendum is passed - and I reckon that is quite likely.
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I'm not sure how linking to a blog reporting on IPSO complaints against the Daily Mail is supposed to be of any relevance to a statement about the frequency of editorial corrections to Carole Cadwalladr's articles, given that she doesn't write for them, and isn't the Daily Mail.
Nor is she the Guardian and Observer. She's a singular writer.
What you'd need to do is find some kind of system that rates how many of Carole Cadwalladr's articles are not corrected by the editors against those that are, and show that it is no greater than other writers, in order to point out that the observation that many of her articles seem to be corrected by the editors is "grossly inflating the truth".
And she does rather seem to peddle conspiracies (particularly around Brexit, but also Russia), both in her articles and Twitter (these are very hard to track, as she has a penchant for deleting them too). This article, for instance, claiming a vast right-wing network of think tanks organising a smear campaign against a whistleblower, was corrected three times - each admitting that a named body from the article was not involved in the smear campaign (nor connected by this network) until the article was left with only one... which was the organisation that had sacked him, and had earlier admitted a smear campaign against him in court.
So in essence the might of her award-winning investigative journalism in that particular article was to find out something that her editors then removed piecemeal until it was gone - because it was either untrue or unproveable, and thus liable for litigation - leaving only the dull original "company sacks whistleblower then tries to muddy his name". Just like in this article, where the central tenet she (and Mark Townsend) asserted was that AIQ was part of Cambridge Analytica, and her editors amended the article twice, including retracting that claim, which was also retracted from another article written on the same day.
That last one is interesting because it contains a second correction, on an original claim which got the Observer group sued. I didn't see Cadwalladr's tweets on the subject, but I've seen it reported that she was "requested" to remove them. However she seems to have doubled down on the claim by bringing Woodcock's name back up again during a huge Tweet thread (in which she also posted already proven false claims about Leave.EU adverts) after the Brexit: The Uncivil War drama screening.
As I said, for an award-winning investigative journalist, her bosses don't half have to issue a bundle of clarifications and corrections after each article...
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Not overly surprising you have so many links to hand...
The reason I linked those posts was because you are attempting to discredit a journalist for her work due to pieces needing corrections (as if this was a fundamental problem). If her work was of such a poor standard to be below what the Observer/Guardian would deem appropriate, they would remove her. As it is they seem happy with her work and continue to employ her and the others who contributed to the links you provided.
The links I provided show the high level of quality of the Guardian and the Observer hold themselves to, compared to the tabloids which you seem to mirror in your approach to many things I've seen you express an opinion of (it just so happened that The Daily Mail was the worst).
Yet, despite this both yourself and @Touring Mars feel it appropriate to conclude that she is a conspiracy theorist. This term is particularly galling in this thread, when the country we all (presumably) live in has been actually harmed, where people have lost jobs due to similar attacks/dismissals on professionals. Project Fear being a prime example of the Leave campaign(s) dismissal of reality as conspiracy theory nonsense.
While @Touring Mars has provided a link to another professional who expressed a counter argument, it still (as far as I can tell) didn't actually say that what she's discovered to be untrue, just that the conclusion she'd drawn to be only half correct.
All you've done is go after a journalist trying to discredit her by showing that one of her articles and two she collaborated on have had corrections made. As you seem to be a bit of an expert of journalists being corrected, do you have the statistics for corrections/updates needed for large investigative pieces?
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If the EU really wanted to ramp up the pressure on those who have thus far rejected the deal on the table, they could turn the tables and make any extension of Article 50 conditional upon accepting the Withdrawal Agreement...
That would mean that the UK would be certain to leave with No Deal unless there was a vote to accept the deal - the EU could then unilaterally extend Article 50 without the UK even requesting them to do so in order to facilitate the formal ratification of the deal.
This actually makes quite a lot of sense - the EU, at this stage, must be very worried about the possible impact of the UK revoking Article 50 altogether would be... the UK would not only be in the forthcoming EU elections, but would also be thrown into an unprecedented General Election at a time when around half of all voters would have a very serious grievance against the parties they voted for in the last election - UKIP or a hardline, pro-Brexit party would clean up in the European elections, and could even win a UK General Election.... the consequences for the UK would be dire, but the consequences for the EU with an openly hostile, anti-European leader could be disastrous.
That would mean that the UK would be certain to leave with No Deal unless there was a vote to accept the deal - the EU could then unilaterally extend Article 50 without the UK even requesting them to do so in order to facilitate the formal ratification of the deal.
This actually makes quite a lot of sense - the EU, at this stage, must be very worried about the possible impact of the UK revoking Article 50 altogether would be... the UK would not only be in the forthcoming EU elections, but would also be thrown into an unprecedented General Election at a time when around half of all voters would have a very serious grievance against the parties they voted for in the last election - UKIP or a hardline, pro-Brexit party would clean up in the European elections, and could even win a UK General Election.... the consequences for the UK would be dire, but the consequences for the EU with an openly hostile, anti-European leader could be disastrous.
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Not really. I'm pointing out that for someone who is an award-winning investigative journalist, she seems to need a lot of editorial corrections to her work. The three I posted change the entire tone of her articles from her discoveries of shocking interconnectedness to literally reporting the news.
The - according to your links, left-leaning publications - do certainly seem happy to continue to pay her for headlining left-leaning articles exposing right-wing corruption, which it later retracts on page 48*.
I wouldn't know - I don't read the papers, and I have the Daily Mail website blocked on my firewall so I don't even accidentally see its website and give them advertising revenue.
I seriously doubt that the Daily Mail, or indeed any mainstream paper, is libertarian though, so it seems unlikely any would mirror my thoughts.
I don't recall saying that. I do recall saying that she does seem to thrive on peddling conspiracies, and posting links to three articles in the Observer/Guardian which feature conspiracies that the papers have later admitted don't exist and edited accordingly. I'd have done the same with her Twitter, but she does have an alarming tendency to post something inflammatory and unsupported and then later delete it - which doesn't seem that far removed from writing something inflammatory and unsupported and then have the editors retract it, just with a shorter paper trail.
I did find that Twitter chain I mentioned earlier. It's in her thread on her thoughts on "Brexit: The Uncivil War". It contains not only another reference to Woodcock and the deleted evidence (which got the Observer group sued) and the Leave.EU adverts that never were, but her complaint about a fictional scene in the film (Cummings giving evidence to parliament) because it never happened... despite the subtitles at the start of the scene noting it took place in 2020.
I'll put it in spoiler tags in case of language:
I've not really gone after anyone, just shown that a journalist you held up in an earlier post as an award-winning investigative journalist does seem to need a lot of corrections to her investigations.
Not to hand, but then I don't read the papers. You seem to have media-rating tools to hand, so perhaps there is a related one for individual journalists?
You do seem to be displacing somewhat.
I'm merely pointing out that this one journalist seems to have a preponderance for finding out things and her outlets publish them, only to later find out that they are not true. Personally it's enough for me to regard her work as something that requires fact-checking. I'm not sure how this is an attack, or why it should offend anyone but her - and judging by her Twitter feed, I'm not sure she'd care all that much.
Or she would, and then try and link me to Leave.EU in some way.
*I don't know where the Observer/Guardian publish their corrections and errata, but my experience of reading newspapers long ago suggests it's far, far away from, and much, much smaller than, the original article
It would but the EU have already said they don’t want the U.K. to leave.
As a response to a user claiming her to be a conspiracy theorist, and can thus be dismissed.
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- 20,681
- TenEightyOne
- TenEightyOne
The amendment (d) preventing a second referendum has been replaced by (e) which removes that part... so no motion at this time to prevent one.
Amendment explanation here.
Amendment explanation here.
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Yes, but that was a while ago - now, their preferred option is that the UK doesn't leave the Customs Union and Single Market... but the EU would (perhaps secretly) be quite happy with either a deal or a Soft Brexit, either one resulting in no more UK influence at the EU table.
Reversing Brexit would, in itself, change the political landscape in the UK so dramatically that it would make the UK's future within the EU considerably more uncomfortable than it was in 2016 - so, while I agree that the EU were totally sincere when they said that they wanted us to stay, I'm not convinced that they still feel like that, and even if they do, they may not realise what they are letting themselves in for..
(Incidentally, I do not doubt for a moment the sentiments expressed by the people of certain European nations, like Netherlands and Germany, who I genuinely believe do not want us to leave - but that still doesn't mean that a right-wing UK stuck inside the EU would work out well for anyone in the longer term).
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Sounds like conspiracy theories...
- 20,681
- TenEightyOne
- TenEightyOne
Tonight's main motion suggests that Parliament will not accept a No Deal Brexit on 29th March. An amendment has just been voted on suggesting that the same is true of any other day... and passed. Parliament has said it will not accept a No Deal Brexit at any time. That's pretty big news and seemingly quite a surprise to the front bench.
Robin
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Mogg is quite right in that the people who voted to take no deal off the table tonight were some of the very same people that voted to invoke article 50 to leave on the 29th with or without a deal! Either way it was a close one, surprisingly close.
Legally we are still leaving and we may be leaving with no deal anyway because there is no guarantee the EU will grant an extension, judging by the mood over there they might just say no and kick us out. In which case it will be decided for us.
As it stands there is no plan on what to do with an extension other than kick the can down the road so it's pointless anyway.
Legally we are still leaving and we may be leaving with no deal anyway because there is no guarantee the EU will grant an extension, judging by the mood over there they might just say no and kick us out. In which case it will be decided for us.
As it stands there is no plan on what to do with an extension other than kick the can down the road so it's pointless anyway.
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If MP’s have rejected No Deal and The Deal, then surely this only ends with no Brexit?
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Theresa May will table a motion that says that the UK will request a prolonged extension to Article 50 unless her deal is passed by Parliament on Wednesday next week.
Meanwhile, some very senior Tories (including Ken Clarke, Dominic Grieve and Oliver Letwin) are apparently now expected to (or will be forced to) resign for breaking the three-line whip on tonight's vote, which could put the government on the brink of collapse.
Meanwhile, some very senior Tories (including Ken Clarke, Dominic Grieve and Oliver Letwin) are apparently now expected to (or will be forced to) resign for breaking the three-line whip on tonight's vote, which could put the government on the brink of collapse.
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