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A prominent Remainer from the media world gives of his wisdom David Yelland is a public relations consultant and former editor of the Sun newspaper.
He blesses us with this tweet:
@davidyelland
So many, but not all, the leading Brexiters are unhealthy and don’t seem to care for themselves. So many, but not all, the leading Remainers are healthy in body, mind and soul. It applies right across the country. We smile, they are angry. #PeoplesVote
12:45 AM – 6 Apr 2019
Edit: And it’s gone. Because of Mr Yelland’s kindness:
Have deleted a Tweet earlier which was a tad unkind to some Brexiters. I do think there is a deep unhappiness in the country which fed the Leave campaign but there’s enough conflict out there without me adding to it.
Someone called “Techboy” ensured that Mr Yelland’s original words were preserved for posterity.
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I think we can file this under “shit I made up”.
Ken Clarke certainly looks like a man who keeps himself in shape doesn’t he? As for us being angry, I’ve no idea why leavers would be angry, it’s a complete mystery.
When people that you disagree with publish an example of your inane musings to be used as a chew toy David, that is not a good thing.
Dear Miss Solent
When I was out campaigning for Leave, it was the remaindeers who were unhappy, angry and abusive.
They still seem to be, despite Brexit.
DP
A nasty fellow, to be sure. We’ll be stuck with him, Remain or Leave, but Leave would be so much better for anyone with the misfortune of ever meeting up with him in the future.
When your idiotic tweet is already being used as a chew toy David, it is too late to delete it.
A further thought. Even if it were true that remainers are totally toned and super fit while leavers are out of shape slobs, what would that prove?
At first glance, I’d have said Mr Yelland is not that good at relating to the public. On second thoughts, I realise we are probably not that select public to whom he seeks to relate.
I’d agree with Stonyground: Moggie looks healthy to me, whereas Clarke looks like he’s been solving the old EU butter surplus. David Mellor looks like he’s been helping. He says the EU is devoted to making ‘Fat Cats Fatter’ and ‘nobody who has anything to do with the European Union could love it’, and (not the conjunction I would have used) Theresa May should revoke Article 50. (I’m sure Mr Yelland thinks remainers have healthier minds in their healthier bodies too.)
It’s in the same vein as Obama’s “folks clinging to guns and religion” and Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” — It allows them to rationalize that the public’s unhappiness couldn’t possibly be their fault, and further suggests that the woes of those too ignorant to appreciate their wisdom are rooted in those people’s poor diet, or superstition, or selfishness, and thus need to be addressed via psychology rather than actually substantively taking their wishes seriously.
Am I the only one who thought that it sounded a bit… well… German?
I’ve noticed that when I am with hunting people, we’re cheerful and smiling-and the antis are sour and angry.
That makes us right, then?
Coal miners out of work, unhappy, unable to afford a top-notch diet? Farmers looking at below-cost grain prices and several kids to feed? Workers unable to find full-time employment in the US and so unable to secure health insurance and get that ugly rash taken care of?
They should get to their health clubs and gyms more often, maybe spend more time tanning on a beach, and they should certainly hit up their local Whole Foods for better quality kale and cold-water fish. Maybe find a good therapist . . .
(The rich always look more healthy and happy then the not-so-rich. That tweet showed all the worldly awareness of an upside-down flounder. I’m sure this guy’s idea of hard times is having to fly to one of his vacation spots sitting back in steerage.)
Also, as helpfully pointed out by Twitter, Yelland was an alcoholic for 24 years and thus neither physically nor mentally healthy.
Quoth bobby, just above:
One of your more felicitous phrases, bobby. 😆
FWIW, this is all pretty standard. One demonizes one enemies to bolster one’s feeling of righteous cause. I am reminded of the Christmas truce during WWI. The top brass were so utterly pissed because actually meeting the enemy face to face may lead one to question the propaganda that they are demons. It is hard to machine gun down a bunch of guys that look like the local grocer or your great uncle Phil.
If you think your cause is obviously right it is necessary to construct a logical reason why someone would not believe it. Attributing dishonesty and evil to one’s enemies helps to take away that nagging feeling that their might be a hole in your argument.
It is built into our DNA. We are a tribal animal and tribes depend on boundaries. Constructed views of the “other” being bad is a mechanism we have evolved to strengthen the tribe. (No doubt there are some leavers who think horrible things about remainers. Emotional reactions are far more easy to construct than solid logical arguments.)
FO–Look at some of the FBPE shite on Twitter or read some more of the pronouncements of remains’ “star performers”. That will bust any illusions about what kind of scum you are dealing with.
–
I’m clinging to (probably irrational) belief that the majority on both sides have at least some understanding of the frustrations on the other, and that the kind of thing we see from David Yelland (and that surname is begging for me to make the obvious near-rhyme) is just the loud minority, which in turn leads the Mr. Ecks to form his, uh, rather strong opinion on remainers. And vice versa, in a never-ending circle of abuse with no-one getting anywhere.
We’re getting closer to a resolution of some description. I don’t think we’ll be able to get a Deal. The two most likely outcomes now are No-Deal, or Revoke. I think No-Deal is the most likely, but not by much.
So, I have enormous sympathy with everyone at the moment – the Leavers who voted thinking we’d be leaving with a Deal, the Leavers who voted “out at any cost” who are looking at the possibility of Revoke with complete horror, and the Remainers who are reading headlines like this and feeling terrified and lashing out.
And it’s irrelevant whether The Standard is biased, or whether the headline is true, or whether it’s intentionally misleading. I’ve read reports that say all sorts of different things, as have we all. My friends in the pharma industry (all two of them) say that No-Deal is a disaster. I’m 100% sure someone else can find an equal amount of people who say otherwise. To clumsily use Hayek to support my point, not everyone can know everything. So people have to rely partly on what they’re told (I don’t think Hayek said that part though!). And the majority (?) of people simply don’t have the time or energy to fact-check everything, and shouldn’t really be blamed for that.
There are huge risks associated with Brexit – we could end up with an increasingly authoritarian surveillance state (which the EU provides some, albeit weak, protection against), or we could end up with an increasingly authoritarian socialist state (which the EU provides, albeit weak, some protection against) if the Tories are voted out – which is a distinct possibility in the real world.
There are also huge economic risks, which we cannot be blind to – it won’t be milk and honey immediately, which most of us know and signed up for when we voted, and Remainers are worried about those as well – and I don’t blame them.
EU citizens who have lived here, lawfully, for many years are scared about what will happen – and with Liam Fox stating that they are “one of our main cards” in a negotation, who can blame them?
The work doesn’t end when (if) Brexit is delivered – especially because of how close the split is between Leave and Remain. Somehow, we need to bring together an almost evenly divided population, to ensure that neither of the authoritarian scenarios I outlined above comes to pass. It can’t be done just by one half of the country. And that means that the mudslinging needs to end. Remainers will need to accept the outcome, and start working on practical solutions to what’s next. Leaves need to accept that Remainers will be unhappy (just as we would be if the outcome was reversed), and also start working on the next steps.
It’s my turn to tell you that I think you’re being naively optimistic.
It seems to me that we’re all in a position much like Russia of 1915 or 1916. We’re that polarized, and I see little possibility that, with the settlement of any one major issue (Brexit, Trump’s era, immigration, whatever), we’re going to get along any better, that the rhetoric will calm, that we’ll see moderates win elections, that cats will lie down with dogs . . .
I think that various positions are going to continue to “win” democratically by one or three or five points, that the center will become thinner and thinner, and that the left will move further left while the right moves further right.
I think we’ll see our own versions of the 1917 Revolutions – likely much less violent – within five to eight years, as each election is simply going to frustrate one side or the other beyond bearing.
In the US, at least, all (federal) congressional restraint is going to disappear, and we’ll see things like the wholesale dumping of rules and conventions by whoever has the momentary power, the expansion of the size of our Supreme Court so that the newly-ruling party can pack it with its own people, the abdication of the rule of law by partisan judges, and eventually either a huge amendment process to our constitution, or the complete disregard of the constitution as someone in power asks “what army do those judges control?”
(I’m not having one of my optimistic weeks, obviously.)
It seems to me that the potential problems that are listed by Neonsnake above as being cause for worry on both sides, would mostly have been resolved by now if the government were competent.
I would absolutely love to vehemently and firmly disagree with you there, bobby b, backing up my disagreement with solid and irrefutable evidence…
…but I suspect that you’re absolutely correct, unfortunately.
The only thing I don’t wholly agree with, is that we’ll get revolutions. I don’t think we will, I don’t think the populace at large is passionate enough, and as long as we’re frogs being boiled slowly, I don’t think that will change. I think it depends on how violent the transition between governments is, and how much it immediately and materially affects people on the lower tiers of the economic ladder.
But I don’t have a firm view on that, and might be wrong.
Yes, it seems that way to me as well. The vast majority of problems are caused by the uncertainty (as an amusing and trivial example, it will be worth checking out the state of retailers leading up to Easter, and compare it to last year – they all have been planned on the basis of us not being in the EU post 29 March, and with possible limited access to EU imports)
With certainty, plans could be drawn up, and any negative impacts minimised. But the utter mismanagement has caused the vast majority of the problems, definitely.
Juncker doesn’t exactly look the picture of health.
One thing’s certain – I’d bet the farm on it if I had one – all vegans are Remainers.
Here
I’ll take that hypothetical farm, thank you very much – on the proviso that it’s a livestock farm.
🙂
Pharma is a special case.
Regulation is huge in Pharma (we know what we think of regulation). The EU-wide regulator has left London and gone to Holland, which is as near London as can be, but no longer in it. That move happened a few months ago; it will not reverse whatever ‘deal’ is or is not made. Some UK pharma people with funding plans based on being co-located with the regulator are now without them (or in an ‘on hold’ that will likely be the same).
My pharma friends are aware of this – and were telling me years before Brexit that the UK government was making a right old mess of pharma, that we had already seen serious shrinkage. Well before the 2016 vote, they were telling me that they and others repeatedly warned UK-gov it was and is killing the UK’s position (they were ignored). Plenty of people have pointed out that the US is ahead on drug innovation. (Critics of the NHS, or socialist medicine in general, make the point often.)
The situation in Scotland is especially bad, with a major Scottish-located effort in targeted drug development being natz-touted in public and natz-ruined in private a few years back (huge story in itself, not suitable for here).
So, I am not surprised in the least to hear that typical pharma people are not enthused. The regulatory hit in that special case may be much less than claimed – or it may be not so much less; in pharma, the (not-)”barking cats” (Milton Friedman) can be mean easily.
You can make a freedom argument for pharma – that Brexit can be good for pharma longer-term – but the NHS gives a special point in this case to the general warnings of some that Brexit is not the solution to our problems – it merely gives us the ability to solve them, less hindered by forces outside our own borders.
Just my 0.02p.
P.S. thanks for the link to the vegan Brexitter. 🙂 In politics, there’s an exception to every rule. Katy, statistically I suspect you are right, but I am unsurprised at exceptions – EU agriculture has been despised for a wide range of reasons since the EEC was first created. (I’m glad you own no farm for neonsake to claim as a debt of honour. 🙂 )
One demonizes one enemies to bolster one’s feeling of righteous cause.
Not necessarily. The canard is that the Right sees the Left as mistaken, while the Left sees the Right as evil.
Coming from the Right myself, I can see something in that, canard or not. A person and his ideas are not the same thing. Disagreeing with a man doesn’t make him evil; he is, at worst, mistaken.
About half of the pro-Brexit people I follow on Twitter are actually from the Labour party. Two of my favourite are Paul Embery, from the Fire Brigades Union, and Kate Hoey, a Labour MP. Both are old-school Labour, the sort of Labour our parents and grand-parents knew. Both are sound on not only Brexit, but also liberty, democracy and free speech. We agree on the end goal – making poor people not-poor – we disagree only on the method. I could easily spend a highly enjoyable evening in the pub with either of them.
And then there’s the Spiked crowd. Their editor, Brendan O’Neill, is one of my very favourite UK columnists. Absolutely sound on free speech. Yes, a bit too much class consciousness, as might be expected from a site that grew up from the ashes of Living Marxism after it was sued into oblivion. Their weekly podcast is generally spot on regarding most issues we are concerned with, and something I tend to save for listening to on Sunday mornings, now that The Archers has become so dire.
bobby b: “It’s my turn to tell you that I think you’re being naively optimistic [that the mudslinging needs to end].”
2,000 years of Europeans fighting and killing each other suggests that history is on your side, Bobby. Even so, it is long past time for smart separatists to start thinking about what happens after Brexit — because separation in some form or another will happen. Given the dog’s breakfast the UK Political Class has made of Brexit, is it reasonable to assume that some slightly reshuffled form of the same group will suddenly become proponents of liberty and masterful international negotiators? Now that the UK leaders have made themselves into the butt of jokes around the world, trade representatives from other countries are certainly going to start with the view that the UK is an easy mark.
Separation is the beginning, not the end. There is a lot of hard work and trying times ahead for the inhabitants of the fractured UK polity. Smart separatists would cut out the childish language and start to focus on how to make the best of a post-Brexit world — which begins with fundamental reform of the UK’s dysfunctional political structure.
and the Remainers who are reading headlines like this and feeling terrified and lashing out.
The problem is that the pro-EU people have been crying wolf for at least a quarter century, going back to the UK’s crashing out of ERM if not further. The only reason the Remainers might have any validity in their fear is that the Brussels Class doesn’t care about the average person in Europe. They care about coalescing their own power and punishing anybody who opposes them; whether the average person suffers for this is beside the point. I could see the EU trying to keep drugs from getting into the UK just out of spite.
Niall Kilmartin – I was enormously amused that my 30 second search for “pro brexit vegan” turned up exactly one example and no more. I think the joke actually worked better than my expected half a dozen.
In fact, all other promising results turned out to be Remain voters, but who had resigned themselves to Brexit and were intent on making the most of it.
Therefore, I make an unimpeachable and unassailable argument that all vegans (every last one) are, in fact, either pro-Brexit, or are very sensible people who have accepted the democratic vote and are prepared to work with it. And I challenge any dissenters to a duel on Hampstead Heath.
Who’d have thought??
Ted S
You are likely right; my feeling is that most people, Joe and Jane “just trying to get by” Average don’t have the facts or background to know that you are likely right. So theyre operating from ignorance (in a non-pejorative form) more than from malice. To those people, I guess I’d rather teach than preach.
Not totally off topic — aging British rocker Mick Jagger had to postpone the latest Rolling Stones concert tour when he suddenly found out he had a serious heart problem. The good news is that Mr. Jagger has already had a successful operation and is on the road to recovery. The interesting part of the story is that Mr. Jagger did not take advantage of the National Health Service, to which he has contributed so much in taxes over the years; instead, he hopped on a flight to New York.
Everyone in the UK, separatists and status quo people alike, can agree that the Westminster Political Class has not covered itself in glory over Brexit. Yet those same under-performers have been in charge of the NHS for decades — and will continue to be in charge of it after separation from the EU, absent significant reform.
In the interests of fairness, it must be noted that many people would say Mr. Jagger made a mistake. Instead of having his surgery in the US, he could have gone to Thailand where he could have had the same operation performed by Western-trained doctors in ultra-modern medical facilities at a fraction of the cost — with the added benefit of cute Thai nurses.
Has he been at the bottle again?
Brexit WAS ONLY EVER GOING TO BE THE FIRST BATTLE.
We will have to fight our own scum for sure. But easier to beat one gang of shite that 28+ the absolute scum of Brussels.
Neonsnake–“the EU offers some protection from tyranny”–unbelievable bullshit. They are prime agents of tyranny.
Mr. X: “Brexit WAS ONLY EVER GOING TO BE THE FIRST BATTLE.”
Absolutely! Glad you recognize that. Unfortunately, it seems that a whole lot of separatists have not realized that yet — judging by the number of Brexiteers who talked about the sunlit uplands of freedom as if they were only an Article 50 away, and the absence of prominent Brexiteers ahead of the 2016 Referendum promising only blood, sweat, and tears along the road to an independent UK.
The UK voted to Leave the EU in June of 2016
The UK is still a member of the EU.
Yay democracy!
The “argument” of David Yelland contains no argument explaining why it is a good thing for the European Union should rule this land (rule the British people).
All his “tweet” consists of is personal vanity (how well he takes care of himself), and abuse of his opponents – who are supposedly ill, and ill because of their own lack of moral virtue.
Gavin Longmuir
I believe you’re right, and if they became proponents of liberty (as *we* define the term), they’d be voted out at the next opportunity to do so by the general populace.
There’s a bloody long way to go yet…