Miscellany 08 July 2016

Whilst Project Fear rumbles on in the blogosfear, others are getting to grips with a new reality, even if it still might never happen.

Oliver Letwin has become the public face of UKGov’s new team which looks a lot like a Brexit steering committee.

The General Data Protection Regulation looks like it might stay, whether Brexit or ChangeOfMindBremainSorryAboutThat.

Intellectual property law - one of the greatest and most cynical barriers to entry and to trade that has ever existed, creating state-sponsored parasites as part of its ‘normal’ function - is so archiac that there are multiple effects of Brexit for all the main types of intellectual property.

Health and safety law for UK onshore operations won’t change much.  The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 works best in the UK common law system.  Offshore operations, which already complied with UK law, appears to have needed re-working anyway (why?) and there is now an open question as to whether European H&S rules for offshore industries could disappear more quickly than it appeared.

A journalist in the West Midlands has discovered that Project Fear’s slanderous presentation of Brexiteers as racist thugs was demonstrably false.  One of the public comments adds to the article, conflating Project Fear with the hard left, noting:

The hard left has never liked democracy, and the reaction to this referendum has confirmed that. They would much prefer a soviet-style hard-left hero ruling the country autocratically, while actually being controled by party aparatchiks and idealists.

Other comments seem to re-hash the pre-referendum arguments, which is quite depressing to read.  The power of Project Fear to disinform and to mislead!

Another journalist did a similar thing, walking from Liverpool to London, attributing Brexit to the legacy of Margaret Thatcher.  The result was a fairly crap journo-opinion.  No doubt, the end of the known universe in billions of years time will be the fault of Margaret Thatcher, too.  Will these idiots ever grow up?  [probably not]  Proof that Project Fear rumbles on!  As one public comment said:

it is worth noting that the Guardian writers screaming about how Brexit will destroy the culture of the UK actually mean that it will stop them having gigs in Berlin, and reduce the grants for European artists wanting to do performance art in the centre of London.

Nothing whatsoever about working class culture, rooted in Britain, and performed by British residents in parts of Britain beyond the metropolitan hubs.

Another journalist, again starting from the morbid curiosity of a standard EurIneer as to why anybody would be nuts enough to vote for Brexit, went to Port Talbot, South Wales.  A former major steel town, the local leaders screamed for EurIn and even had lots of ‘European’ money being poured into the town to keep it going.  But the local people voted for Brexit anyway.  The locals rebelled against their local overlords, and the journalist claimed that the Brexiteers had gone quiet for fear of reprisals from Tata Steel.  (Either that, or the journo couldn’t be bothered to find them in the pubs).  The only pointer to the reason for the Brexit vote was that they were “hell bent on the immigration issue”.

Foreign secretary Philip Hammond confirmed that there were no plans at present for dealing with Brexit. (Express, RT)

And Amazon is going to create 1,000 new jobs in the UK (subscription required).  Oops, Project Fear missed that one…