Italian journalist Paolo Barnard thinks Brexit is just great for Britain and hopes it spreads.
I’d be interested to know how widespread this view is and how respected Mr Barnard is in Italy.
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21 comments to Paolo Barnard |
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I like the cut of his jib.
Very high energy.
1. I’m always in awe of how well these people can speak foreign languages. Who could argue with a bloke who speaks Italian so fluently ?
2. Two cracking soundbites which weren’t underlined nearly enough by Leave during the Fear campaign, nor during the post Brexit “let’s have a Mulligan” campaign :
(a) exports to the EU are 12% of GDP, but it’s 100% of UK economic activity which is entangled in EU regulatory bindweed
(b) the “voices of British business” who show up on the telly to warn of the horrors of Brexit, are the big companies representing the 12%; the other 88% are the smaller fish who don’t appear on the telly
A leftist fruitcake it seems from Italian Wikipedia has a blog where also shows erotic parts of him, anti-zionist(Finkelstein, Chomsky extraction), anti-Reagan, anti-Thatcher, anti war against terrorism. In his story it seems to be a loose cannon with a several conflicts.
So it seems, yet he praised the ability post-Brexit for the UK to deregulate and set medium/small businesses free… so clearly a strange mutant version of leftist one rarely sees in the UK with at least some good idea.
He should change his name to Nigello Faraggio.
And whilst we are at it, in Spanish, if you termed ‘Brexit’ as ‘Bréxito’, that would include the Spanish word ‘éxito’, which means ‘success’.
Speaking of Spain – Spain has no functioning government since the elections of December 2015 – only a caretaker government. Another election in June 2016 didn’t resolve the impasse. Yet the economy is “galloping” along at 3% growth, the most in at least 10 years.
Conclusion: government gridlock is good for you.
Whatever happens next, Brexit causes a freeze of new regulations for a couple of years at least. Good news.
Jacob,
Note the convenient Belgian government absence around the 2008 crash. A Belgian friend (and he has inpecable continental social democrat credentials…) pointed out that Belgium was able to avoid suffering from the crash because the lack of government meant that spending programs were finishing and state spending falling at a good rate. Admittedly he argues that the Belgian provinces having extensive powers meant they could pick up the slack where necessary, but it’s a nice argument all the same. Our reaction to an economic crisis should be to suspend government (admittedly in the UK voters tend to elect the Conservatives, which is normally the smallest-government option).
Perry he is adept of Modern Monetary Theory.
So he supports some of the right things for the wrong reasons then 😀
I liked his conclusory sentence: “[T]hey [the huge companies] are scared of the loss of control over a neo-feudal, authoritarian and anti-democratic project called the European Union.” Sounds about right.
Actually the reasons he gives in the video are all sensible reasons — arguably with one exception, when he hints that the State being able to print money is good for the people.
Based on the Italian wikipedia page, my wild guess is that he is mainly motivated by antagonism to what he calls the nomenklatura (the ruling class, as i call it). That instinct is sound, the problem seems to be that he is willing to champion any argument against the establishment, no matter how loony (it just happens that, on this particular issue, he hits on all the right arguments).
Nigello Faraggio, indeed! Although you will have noticed that he gives low marks to UKIP in the video.
The Estonian government sort of suspended itself in reaction to the 2008 economic crisis. It must have been the right thing to do, given that Paul Krugman said it was the wrong thing to do.
For them as don’t remember the Cold War, the nomenklatura is what Party appointees to influential positions in the Soviet Union were called, characterised by their loyalty to the ideology and leadership of the Party. Using the term is rather more pointed than talking of a ruling class eliding, as it does, the Party with the Project and suggesting a system of patronage rather than any sense of meritocracy.
Clearly, “nomenklatura” is derived from the same root as is the phrase “klatu barada nikto“. I think they are what Mr Ed would call “cognates”.
The Day the Earth Stood Still is one of the most awesome gonzo films ever. Aliens come to earth and say “you must reorder your politics in accordance with our views or we will exterminate the entire human species”… and they are held to be the good guys 🙂
There is a shop in London called ‘Laird Hatters‘, i wonder if that is the derivation of the phrase ‘As mad as a hatter‘?
Mr Ed, perhaps they misspelled the name by including an extra “t”.
The Economist magazine (yes Paul is bashing one of his most favoured targets again) says that Italian banks should be bailed out – because if they are not bailed out (and collapse) the anti Euro arguments of the Italian “Five Star” movement will become more popular.
The hatred of the Economist magazine is, to me, an indication that the “Five Star” movement may be a good thing.
After all it just beat the socialists in the elections to be Mayor of Rome and Mayor of Turin.
Odd that the “Classical Liberal” Economist magazine should back the Italian socialists – but considering it backed Barack Obama (twice) not really odd at all.
To tell the truth, in Italy the Five Star Movement (movimento 5 Stelle) are not that “liberal”. They are more like a catch-all party with a green/progressive agenda and populist tendencies. The Democratic Party (the “socialists”) is now the party who most follows mainstream centre-left and slightly-pseudoliberal policies. Regarding Paolo Barnard, I’d say that there are few people who give him consideration.
Actually the Democratic Party could claim to be the least socialist major party in Italy at the moment, having been behind the 2 main phases of free-market reforms in the last 20 years or so, in the 1990s and in the last couple of years. Matteo Renzi has even managed to get through some labor market reforms, something which i had been told (by an Italian, on PJMedia, but the article seems to have disappeared) one cannot even talk about, in Italy.
It is true that they have got little work done between the first Prodi government and the current Renzi government, however. I suppose it is also true that they use rhetoric designed to attract the “left-wing” vote.