<nettime> Brexit democracy

[Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

From Sauvons l'Europe newsletter
http://sauvonsleurope.eu/brexit-hold-up-sur-la-democratie/
In French Deepl.com translated:

Brexit: Democracy robbery?

By Arthur News/editorial comment
November 6,2017

We have already written about the confiscation of the most basic 
democratic principles in the United Kingdom since the Brexit referendum, 
because the will of the people expressed to one or two percent more on 
the basis of a fabric of lies is a new democratic Grail that can suffer 
no defilement. As a result, Parliament had to be kept out of the way, 
official reports on the effects of Brexit cannot be made public and Her 
Majesty's Government is asking Her Majesty's opposition to sanction 
opposition MPs who do not support the Government's position.

Through our friend Jean-Guy Giraud, we discover that more than half of 
Leave's campaign contributions, nearly £15 million, were made by only 
five people (including the Conservative Party treasurer). This is quite 
legal in the United Kingdom, but should lead any sincere democrat to 
question the meaning of a democracy where five individuals alone can 
fund the bulk of an election campaign. In all honesty, we should add 
250,000 pounds spent by the now-famous Unionist Party of Northern 
Ireland, the DUP, whose donee is unknown because of provisions linked to 
local "events", and which represents three times its largest campaign to 
date. A shell detail, this quarter million was mainly spent on the 
purchase of pro-leave pages in Metro, which is... not distributed in 
Northern Ireland.

On the expenditure side, things are also surprising. In contrast to a 
classic election campaign, Leave camp entrusted more than half of its 
campaign budget to Aggregate IQ and Cambridge Analytica, for the 
implementation of targeted arguments based on individual profiles 
collected on social networks, at a time when Facebook still allowed this 
practice. The essence of the campaign was not to convince voters, but to 
motivate the probable Leavers and push the probable Remainers to abstain 
by bombarding them with demoralizing news about the British political 
system. The incredible abstention rate of young people, the vast 
majority of whom are pro-European and major consumers of social 
networks, shows that this strategy has had a real impact. For the 
record, Cambridge Analytica's Managing Director was Steve Bannon, who 
later became Trump's special advisor to the White House. This does not 
mean, of course, that the Russians did not seek to interfere in this 
election.

Finally, a number of large donors from the Leave camp and the 
Conservative Party are now pushing for a Hard Brexit without an 
agreement. The implicit, and sometimes explicit, idea is then to turn 
the United Kingdom into a tax and financial paradise on the doorstep of 
the Union, like a kind of huge Hong Kong with Stilton

It is increasingly surprising that this vote, whose anti-European camp 
was largely financed by a handful of English and foreign plutocrats who 
had in mind a profound transformation of the country's economy in favour 
of opaque finance, and who resorted to methods of mass manipulation to 
win, is still being presented here and there as a summit of modern 
democracy.
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