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Sunday 25 October 2015

Don’t Menshn Portugal

After yesterday’s deeply dishonest claims by the Telegraph’s resident EU naysayer Ambrose Evans Pritchard over this month’s elections in Portugal, what we need now is someone to give clarity to the situation. Instead, readers of the Sun on Sunday get a woefully misinformed rant from (thankfully) former Tory MP Louise Mensch, who has done away with mere misinformation and decided to talk well, while lying badly.
(c) Doc Hackenbush 2014

BREXIT looks more likely than ever after the EU coup in Portugal” she blusters, going seriously wrong from the off. The EU has not intervened in any way in the Portuguese electoral process. But do go on. “The Eurosceptic Left has a coalition with a majority but to protect the euro the President won’t let its leader form a government. Stuff the will of the people”. Not getting any better, is it? Let me explain.

The largest party after the October 4 elections is the grouping led by outgoing Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho, with 107 of the 230 parliamentary seats. His is a pro-EU and pro-Euro party. The main centre-left opposition party, the PS, won 86 seats. It too is a pro-EU and pro-Euro party. It is only the two left-wing parties, the BE or Left Block, and the Communists, with 19 and 17 seats respectively, who can be called Eurosceptic.

I’ll go further: the PS is in a different European Parliament grouping to the BE and Communists. The PS didn’t want to talk to the BE or Communists before the elections, and neither did the BE or Communists want to talk to the PS. The three groups only started talking once they saw the electoral maths, and even then, had not put any formal offer before the President by the time he asked Passos Coelho to continue.
Yes, she really wrote that

Moreover, any coalition between the PS, BE and Communists is going to be a very shaky one, especially given the latter group’s stated aims to leave not only the Euro, but also the EU - and, while they’re at it, NATO as well. On top of that, the BE (Bloco de Esquerda, in case you were wondering) is aligned with parties such as Syriza in Greece. These three parties have a history of not getting on with one another.

There is no “Eurosceptic left coalition”. Nor is there one politician who can claim to lead all three centre-left and left-wing groupings. So Ms Mensch demonstrates once again why she generates so much unintentional hilarity when she styles herself an “investigative journalist”, because she neither does coherent journalism, and nor does she trouble herself with investigation - especially not with Portugal’s elections.

The reality is that President Anibal Cavaco Silva has asked the largest party to try and form a Government. That has been the custom in Portugal since the restoration of democracy to the country more than 40 years ago, whatever the programme of that largest party. Louise Mensch could have found that out with no more than a few minutes’ Googling. Instead, she chose to tell another pack of lies.

And remember, folks, they allowed her to become an MP.

7 comments:

SteveB said...

Mensch standing up forward left-wingers including communists? Has she thought this one through.....

Anonymous said...

The more she sucks up to Creepy Rupe the more I'm tempted to ask: How long before she's referred to as Unter-Mensch?

Arnold said...

I really can't believe in a Brexit. It's a massive leap into the unknown for those who don't remember the UK before we joined. Apart from Mail and Express readers who see the 1950s as a golden age, why would anyone vote to leave?

Steam must be coming out of Dacre's ears at present. It's getting personal.

"EU will force farmers who receive grants to erect permanent billboards on their land or face having their funding withdrawn"

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3287893

Andy McDonald said...

It was a 'golden age' because you were guaranteed a job no matter how thick you were, and you could rest in the understanding that however shit your life was, there were always poofters, women and darkies to kick around and feel superior to.

NeilW said...

"why would anyone vote to leave?"

So that the UK can implement policies that benefit the people of the UK rather than the corporations that actually dictate how the EU is run.

Did people just miss what the ECB did to Greece? Banks it has declared solvent were denied liquidity bringing the Greek banking system to its knees (since it could neither access the insurance system, nor the central bank). That's because Greece tried to go a different path.

The creditor is superior to the debtor in the EU. Their will must always prevail regardless of the human suffering.

The EU is a corporate behemoth that actually requires the citizens of the EU to wander around the continent in search of a job and an income at the behest of business. What does that do to established communities?

If you are outside the EU that you can change the narrative so that the state has first access to the resources of the nation for the required public purpose. Then the private sector can be allowed to work with what is left, and finally the public sector can take those resources left over by the private sector (aka the millions of unemployed, underemployed and misemployed) to fulfil the 'nice to have' public purpose.

In other words the state, correctly constituted, can contain the nuclear reactor of the private sector and prevent it causing hardship.

You can't do any of that within the EU because the supremacy of the private sector is baked into the treaty.

With open borders and EU rules you can never get rid of unemployment and poverty at the national level. You can only fiddle around the edges. And the forces of corporatism are working day and night to prevent that ever happening - which is what the TTIP and TPS treaties are all about. Giving corporations the right to sue national governments.

I find it astonishing that anybody on the left supports the EU structure. You do wonder exactly how much more has to be taken away before people wake up to what it actually is.

mirandola said...

If her long term plan is to creep up to Creepy Uncle Rupert so much that she ends up in a marital bed with him (somethings the imagination just does not want to imagine), she should be warned that another aging toothy blond is already through the stable door:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/11953721/Rupert-Murdoch-and-Jerry-Hall-romantically-involved.html

Anonymous said...

Aaaarrgghhhh.

Probably like a wizened prune turned sour trying to roll over a peach.

Yeuk.