"“An address by a foreign leader to both houses of Parliament is not an automatic right. It is an earned honor, Bercow told MPs on Monday.
“Before the imposition of the migrant ban, I would myself have been strongly opposed to an address by President Trump in Westminster Hall. After the imposition of the migrant ban, I am even more strongly opposed…
“I feel very strongly that our opposition to racism and to sexism and our support for equality before the law and an independent judiciary are hugely important considerations in the House of Commons,” he added." usatoday
—————-
Smug. Pretentious. Self-congratulatory, Vertically challenged = John Simon Bercow
In 1775 the colonists in North America did not wish to reject their king, however repellent George III may have been. No, what they objected to was the smug assertion of authority over the colonies by the Westminster Parliament and resulting taxation without representation as well as most of the other grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence. Some attitudes never seem to change.
Is it not correct that the UK wants a special trade agreement with the United States? Both Teresa May and Bercow have now offended the head of state and head of government of the US.
Is this the way to obtain that agreement? pl
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/02/07/trump-address-uk-parliament/97582218/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bercow
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_Independence
Col. Lang
The biggest “crime” perpetrated by Donald J. Trump is he is not PC.
He has offended all the smug and pretentious people on both sides of the pond including our Borg media, the establishment of both parties and those of our punditry and twitterati who have convinced themselves that their “morality” however duplicitous is the only way. The European establishment too is firmly in PC land. They are going to be reeling in a few months if Geert Wilders & Le Pen win their elections.
IMO, Trump’s biggest sin is that he defeated the Borg’s very own Queen despite every attempt by the media to upend him. I hope he recognizes that he does not owe them anything and executes his office with complete disregard to their hypocritical “norms”.
Quite the laffer to hear the British government lecture the US on racism and sexism.
Col.,
perhaps the beginning of the UK’s journey back to the EU? We’ll see whether so-called Trumpism in the British isles and the content is real.
I just checked around online. This story went up on the Guardian about a half hour and has over 2000 comments already.
I don’t recall any American presidents addressing the Houses of Parliament but, as W.R. Cummings used to say here, “I could be wrong, as always”. The question I’d have about such an event is, to what end? The administration isn’t even three weeks old and hasn’t (yet) made America great again, saved the world, or cured cancer. Also, the prospect of listening to a Trump speech probably would have the MPs recalling having their nannies administer doses of castor oil.
WPFIII
Oops! I just read the USA Today article and observed that Clinton and Reagan and an assortment of other leaders have been invited to do it.
“In 1775 the colonists in North America did not wish to reject their king . . . Some attitudes never seem to change.”
Thank you.
Bercow is a typical smug and profoundly confused virtue signaling air head ass. There sure are a lot of them these days. Many of us are wearying of them and their postures.
He’s against sexism, but pro-Islam? How does one carry those competing thoughts in one’s head. It must be dizzying.
Independent judiciary? Muslims in his country are calling for Sharia law and courts.
Where is the racism he refers to? I think the majority of the citizens of the impacted countries are classified as “Caucasians?” When did Islam become a race?
Lemmings with delusions of grandeur having something to do with moral superiority.
As long as it doesn’t hurt the US, IMO, Trump should make an example of these fools.
For all the NeverTrumpers who believe Trump is racist due to his stance on illegal immigration, here’s a short video.
https://twitter.com/Chemzes/status/828244148931194881?s=03
I will be on a constituent conference call with Tulsi Gabbard today ( she is my Rep), do you guys have any questions you would like me to ask her?
Walter
Bercow started out as a member of the Monday Club – a sort of British John Birch Society, but rather more right wing.
So, now he’s overcompensating. His wife is also a godawful self-publicist and loud liberal. She wears the trousers in that marriage.
Perhaps, it is properly framed negotiating by insult considering the targeted audience?
Bercow is an arch neocon with a passion for aggrandisement, often of the financial sort. His former Conservative Party colleagues loathe him with a passion. Thought this article was a good riposte.
http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/02/john-bercow-consistently-voted-iraq-war-hes-colossal-hypocrite-not-hero/
John Bercow consistently voted for the Iraq war. He’s a colossal hypocrite, not a hero.
The Twitter-cheering for John Bercow, the transformation of him into a Love, Actually-style hero of British middle-class probity against a gruff, migrant-banning Yank, could be the most grotesque political spectacle of the year so far. Not because it’s virtue-signalling, as claimed by the handful of brave critics who’ve raised their heads above the online orgy of brown-nosing to wonder if Bercow is really promoting himself rather than parliamentary decency. No, it’s worse than that. It’s the lowest species of cant, hypocrisy of epic, eye-watering proportions, an effort to erase Bercow’s and Parliament’s own bloody responsibility for the calamities in the Middle East that Trump is now merely responding to, albeit very badly.
Bercow, you see, this supposed hero of the refugees and Middle Eastern migrants temporarily banned from the US, voted for the bombing of Iraq. He green-lighted that horror that did so much to propel the Middle East into the pit of sorrow and savagery it currently finds itself. As his profile on the They Work For You website puts it, ‘John Bercow consistently voted for the Iraq War’. On 18 March 2003, he voted against a motion saying the case for war hadn’t been made, even though it hadn’t. On the same day he voted for the government to ‘use all means necessary’ to ensure the destruction of Iraq’s WMD.
As everyone knows now, and as many of us knew back then, Iraq’s WMD capacity had been vastly exaggerated by the black propaganda of the New Labour government, by myth and misinformation cynically whipped up to the end of providing Britain’s leaders with the thrill of an overseas moral crusade against evil. Bercow voted in favour of these lies. And he voted for the use of ‘all means necessary’ to tame Saddam’s regime. We know what this involved: Britain joined the bombing campaign and courtesy of an ill-thought-through war by Western allies, Iraq was ripped apart and condemned to more than a decade of bloodshed. And refugee crises. Bercow was one of the authors of this calamity, one of the signatories to the Middle East’s death warrant, and now we’re going to let him posture and preen against Trump’s three-month ban on certain Middle Eastern migrants? What is wrong with us?
Bercow isn’t alone. Harriet Harman says she was ‘horrified when [Trump] announced this ban on people from Muslim countries’ and says he shouldn’t be allowed to address parliament. Ms Harman voted for the bombing of Iraq, and Libya, and Syria (they lost that vote). She voted for the military action that contributed to the unravelling of those Muslim countries and to a surge in refugees, and now has the gall to cry crocodile tears over Trump’s treatment of those refugees. Please. Do not insult our moral intelligence.
There’s also Yvette Cooper. She’s raged against Trump’s temporary ban too. She voted for the Iraq War (and against an investigation into it) and she voted for military action in Libya. Just look at Libya now; it is an unspeakable mess; hundreds of thousands of people have fled. Most starkly, most shamelessly, Alastair Campbell has been cheering Bercow for keeping the migrant-mistreating Trump out of our morally pristine parliament. Someone has to say it: Campbell is arguably responsible for more death and destruction in the Muslim world than Trump is ever likely to achieve. His spin cost lives, his spin made refugees. Trump’s misleading statements and rash orders pale into insignificance in comparison with the carnage Campbell helped to unleash.
This is what was truly despicable about Bercow’s anti-Trump posturing and parliamentarians’ cheering of it and the Twitterati’s fawning over it: this very house that doesn’t want Trump to address it, these green benches and the self-satisfied Trump-bashers sat on them, gave the go-ahead to actions that contributed to immense instability in the Muslim world. That media types are lapping this up shows how completely they have retired their critical faculties in the Trump era. In their mind Trump is evil and everyone who hates Trump is good. It’s a new infantile moral code, fashioned by an at-sea political and media set desperate for some sense of clarity in the era of Brexit and political upset. And now they have that clarity: Trump is fascism, anti-Trump is decency. It’s the morality of the nursery, eschewing complexity and analysis and muddying historical truth.
Indeed, it’s becoming clear that Trump-bashing is primarily a means of moral cleansing, of averting the public and historic gaze from your own sins and crimes and confusions by taking part in the Two Minute Hate of this ‘New Hitler’. Just say: ‘I oppose Trump, and therefore I’m good.’ Shame on everyone indulging this spectacle, clapping and tweeting as the politicians who started a decade of war berate a politician for passing a three-month travel ban.
Tell her to call Trump and say she should be hired at State instead of Abrams.
The inevitable blowback…
John Bercow apologises to Lords counterpart amid Trump visit row https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/07/john-bercow-accused-of-hypocrisy-over-trump-stance
Bercow’s comments prompted a series of Conservative MPs to criticise him, with the government also making plain its displeasure.
“Anyone who knows the Speaker will know that he speaks his mind. But he doesn’t speak for the government,” the communities secretary, Sajid Javid, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
“The government is very clear: President Trump is the leader of our most important ally, he’s elected fairly and squarely, and it’s manifestly in our national interests that we reach out to him and we work with him, and he visits us in the UK.”
John Whittingdale, a former culture secretary, said Bercow was seeking “as much publicity as possible” and should have instead talked privately to Theresa May.
He told Sky News: “It was a performance, it was John Bercow playing to the gallery and I think it was damaging to the national interest. I think it is regrettable that he did it.”
————–
Commons Speaker John Bercow should be stripped of control over Westminster Hall speeches after his attack on ‘racist’ Trump, says Lords counterpart Lord Fowler http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4198788/Bercow-faces-fight-job-amid-backlash-Trump-ban.html
The pompous, self-righteous name calling and attempted shaming (of Trump) only makes the moralizer look lame. I don’t know why people think they will be able to successfully go against Trump simply by speaking some variation of ‘You are really, really bad and I hate you and everything you do or say.’
https://youtu.be/d-OE-MdBI40 Kevin Kline opinion of the British from “A Fish Called Wanda”
I want to complement the Committee and laud the value of free speech! I learned a great deal reading these comments and reviewing the links.
The hypocrisy of these people who have caused so much death and destruction is too much to bear. I find it amusing in a galling way to see all these faux attacks on Trump by both the liberals and conservatives who have caused so much carnage.
The backlash is only getting started in Europe who are now faced with a real consequence of their destabilization of the Middle East.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4199918/Most-Europeans-want-end-migration-Muslim-countries.html
Valissa
The best rated comments on the Daily Mail article you linked to say it all. Clearly DM readers are not on the side of the condescending speaker of the UK parliament.
Quite so. But remember that Bercow was desperate for that job for the money. That’s pretty much all that had ever motivated that small minded, small brained, small man.
Ask her if she wouldn’t rather be in Hanalei. :~)
Pat
I think a good FTA with Britain can be very much in the interest of the US, too.
What I think could be good in such an agreement is that it should be possible for Trump to pitch the City of London against Wall Street, thereby bringing a bit more competion in the financial industry of the US and Britain, shaking up the oversized status quo in the financial sector and consolidate overcapacities there.
So, I wouldn’t see a US-British FTA as a favor to Britain, but as a good thing for both the US and Britain if it’s done right.
Origin
Whose free speech is threatened? pl
Colonel,
History rhymes.
The USA may withdraw from Europe after the next fiscal crisis but the US military will never voluntarily leave England. The King and Queen reside in Buckingham Palace.
Today the Democrats are officially powerless. The anti-public school billionaire sister of Eric Prinz, Betsy DeVos, was confirmed. Neil Gorsuch will be confirmed as the next Justice of the Supreme Court with a straight majority vote. Environmental and consumer protections will be gutted. Maryland will be fracked. The sad part will be watching Chuck Summer and Nancy Pelosi acting as if they are not total losers for restarting the Cold War 2.0 with Russia and throwing the middle class under the bus. I don’t think Globalists will be pouring any more bribes down the Democrat money hole. Instead, rather than suffering eight whole yeas with the anti-Globalist Trump Administration, they will fund and corporate media will provoke a pink revolt.
VV
“the US military will never voluntarily leave England. The King and Queen reside in Buckingham Palace” Secret royalists? pl
Bandolero
Only the bond and/or currency markets moving against the central banks despite their all out efforts will dampen the financial sector. Watch the JGB market where the BoJ have pegged the 10yr at 100 basis and own a third of all outstanding government debt and are a top ten holder of equity in the companies in the Nikkei 100.
London Bob – that sets it all out just so.
One minor point. I seem to remember many Conservatives didn’t want Bercow as a speaker because he was too “left”, but I’m open to correction on that. “Left”, in today’s world, being quite compatible with an interventionist or “neocon” foreign policy,
Pity the PM didn’t immediately disassociate HMG from the Speaker’s remarks.
Colonel,
No. Not as sovereign. The Windsors serve in the role of America’s royal family.
VV
“The Windsors serve in the role of America’s royal family.” Who knew? Maybe on CNN. The notion that the US military reveres the Windsors is something new to me. My genealogist told me yesterday that John Lackland is among my ancestors. Who did you say the Windsors (Saxe-Coburg/Hanover) are?
Wall street & the City are run by the same people and the same companies. I would not expect much competition except in rule breaking
A royal family is not something you revere. It is more an opium for the people
charly
The US military does not give a damn for the British royal family. pl
Stop the PC. It is not the UK that is leaving the EU but England (& Wales). England wants a good deal with the US but it absolutely needs a great* trade deal with the EU so kicking Trump can just be seen as trying to incur favor with the EU
* So great that you can only get it by asking very, very nicely. Negotiating or treating can’t get such a fantastic deal
charly
That’s why I think it could be very good. The City and Wall St are major centers of the Borg and power players versus Trump & his people. If Trump can make them go after each other, that could weaken them. A US-British FTA may accomplish that if Trump sets it up properly.
Today we had some reports that the City will lose about 30k jobs dealing with EU-27 after Brexit. See eg:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/feb/07/brexit-uk-finance-brussels-thinktank-city-banking-eu-bruegel
https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-02-07/brexit-risks-30-000-u-k-jobs-and-17-of-bank-assets-study-says
The owners of the City hope they can move that business into EU-27 after Brexit. But my understanding here from Germany is that the EU-27 financial industry will do anything to block such moves and take over British financial bizz in EU-27 after Brexit, and with the German horse Jean-Claude Juncker at the top EU job, I think the EU-27 financial industry will manage that.
If I’m right that means the City will desperately look for new bizz. Here can Trump come in and say: dear City, I can give you lot’s of new bizz and market access with an FTA. But I have one major condition: you work on my side vs the entrenched Borg powers of Wall St.
It would be a win-win – or, one may say, it could be a deal hard to reject.
There’s may be more to this than a publicity stunt against Trump. May tried to use the prerogative to trigger the Brexit process, but was beaten back by the judges, who re-asserted the supremacy of parliament. When May invited Trump on a state visit it seems she didn’t seek the speaker’s permission for the address to the house of commons, arguably impugning the supremacy of parliament in an obscure procedural way. The speakers are there to protect parliament against the crown, and Bercow takes that job seriously. I’m sure the American revolutionaries started out with many skirmishes over the prerogative.
begob
They did do that in defense of their colonial provincial parliaments but I do not recall that they reviled the sovereign. POTUS is not sovereign but he is head of state. pl
Charly – you say “A royal family is not something you revere. It is more an opium for the people”.
Off the top of my head I think I might find one or two reasons to persuade you otherwise. It’s a good arrangement, having a Monarch as Head of State. In fact when your own Head of State’s done with draining your swamp, if you sent him over to the UK to do the same for us we could maybe do a swap for a bit and you could try it out. Deal? Anyway, here are the reasons I hope will convert you:-
– The Queen provides an apolitical focus of loyalty for the Armed Forces.
– Similar for the Judiciary. Maybe more in theory than in practice but it’s a nice theory. Same for the Civil Service.
– Ceremonial events. That’s more important than it might seem. A community getting together to mark a significant event needs an embodiment of the community present for it to work. An apolitical Monarch does that better than a necessarily partisan politician.
– Custom and sentiment. Also more important than it might seem at first sight.
– probably cuts down corruption. A Blair or a Clinton family doesn’t have much time to make money from their position so has to get a move on. With unseemly results. Having a member of the Royal Family rather than a politician as Head of State cuts that out for at least one top position. And, as with Trump of course as it happens, our Head of State’s already got a lot of money so doesn’t need to devote her time to getting more.
– insulating the Head of State from the necessity of forever gathering in party political donations has to be a good thing. Look at the number of fund raising dinners Obama attended in his last year. A good thing in his case I suppose, since it gave him less time to spend droning wedding parties, but is drumming up donations really what you want to see a Head of State spending so much time on?
– Constitutional backstop. If the politicians really kick over the traces then there’s an institution with immense prestige and considerable authority to hold them back. An anchor seldom evident when things are calm but there for when the wind gets up.
Of course at times of great stress, particularly at a time such as this when the cronies are running wild with the left cheering them on, no constitutional anchor can be guaranteed to hold. The ultimate safeguard of security and good governance must always be the sense and instincts of the people. But in normal times it’s a better anchor than most and probably considerably cheaper.
I hope that list changes your mind but if not here’s the clincher. The Queen herself is mad keen on horse racing and was rumoured to be not amused by the hunting ban. What more do you need to ensure undying loyalty?
Bercow’s stance against Trump as Trump is bogus, in my view – as head of state of an ally he must be granted all respect and courtesy. This is really part of an internal struggle in the UK, dressed up for the tabloid press.
In fact, functional constitutional monarchies have been politically more stable than other forms of government.
The English Monarch, in her person, also unites England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
If the Monarchy is dissolved, the English Constitution will dissolve with it and these four constituent parts no longer have the legal basis of remaining together.
The English Monarch embodies some of the ideas of the Principe of the Roman Emperors – after the Octavian Revolution – it seems to me.
Col. Lang, different topic, but you might find this interesting – Guccifer2.0: Game Over
That’s a serious point and I would have respected Bercow if he’d made it. Bercow’s grandstanding, however, didn’t, as far as I could see, get that point across. But there could have been a lot of behind the scenes too-ing and fro-ing beforehand, so the House might have understood what Bercow was up to.
It’s a self-contained bubble and they might not have understood how it looked to outsiders. I still think, therefore, that Mrs May should have closed it down firmly.
I can name three royal corruption scandals and royalty is not something i follow so the dream that they are not corrupt is sadly a dream. In fact they are worse than Clinton
Charly – it’s a frequency thing. When a country has to provide a fortune for a Clinton or a Blair type political family it has to do it every few years. If the Head of State is permanent then the country only has to provide one fortune for one family and it’s job done. If you think about it, if the Royal Family had done a Clinton every generation for the past millennium or so they’d have ended up owning half England by now.
Yes. The thought occurs to me as well. They do, is what you’re saying, isn’t it?
If you could just let me have the point about fox hunting I’ll make do with that.
English,
“Ceremonial events” I think you are correct. This is why the cultural marxists are forever attacking our public symbols and creating their own hollow version. The protests at the inaugural, the pink hat parade the day after and now the liberal celebration of the”resist” movement. They are both a hollow ceremonial and a linkage to sentiment to lock in, for the millennial generation, a new “custom”: that America is not an aspirational society but was flawed from the start and only a repudiation of the founder’s Republic and a replacement with a new Utopian American can it be just.
“Vive la Resistance!” As my newly elected state representative puts it on FB. It’s the new uprising in the Vendée to return the establishment to power! This gives the precious snowflakes who have been bankrupting themselves and their families in an effort to buy their way into member in the academic petite noblesse a new reason for being. They are now just like mom and dad, whose greatest service to America was to march, to sign, to protest. And let us not forget- the hedonism; To some it is the most important thing they do (or did) in college.
Fred – you use the term “Utopian” though I have become accustomed to the term “Millenarian”. Either way, isn’t this the real heresy of the “Progressives”? They want an ideal society, so constructed that it is not possible for man to be evil, and in which he can live in a state of natural or Rousseau-ian goodness. To this end, for example, the children must be as far as possible distanced from their parents, from whom they can only inherit psychoses and dysfunctional attitudes, distanced from their communities that will infect them similarly, and conditioned by a benevolent state in right thinking and right conduct. Every now and again a progressive surfaces who says precisely that.
It’s a heresy because it fails to recognise that we are not naturally perfect and no amount of social engineering will make us so; we will never settle into a static condition of perfection. A heresy also because it seeks to dispense with true Free Will. If evil could truly be abolished by social engineering – the progressives’ impossible dream – then good ceases to have meaning.
If “Utopianism” can convey that heresy then what can the converse be styled? “Traditionalism” seems to be used a lot, but the French are giving some odd slants to that term and in any case although the term conveys that we are necessarily rooted in our past, it fails to convey the essential open-endedness with which any society must fashion its future; the traditionalist, or whatever we are to call him, must no more seek to prescribe his society’s ultimate future than the progressive. A community is a continuing process and not something that can be locked down.
Would you agree that that that definition of “progressivism” is a fair definition? And what term could be used for those reject it?
Unless the SNP can pull a rabbit out of the hat pretty quickly it is the UK, all of it including NI, that will be departing the EU. That’s if Mrs May means what she says. I believe she’s read the mood correctly and does.
I don’t know whether the other consideration you mention is what’s in the politicians’ minds. But whatever our or the continental European politicians are up to, the spectacle of them vying to show disrespect to the new American President is an ugly spectacle whatever they think they will get out of it. The talk is all of Trump failing to observe the diplomatic niceties. Looks the other way round to me.
I stand with Bercow. My memory is long.
http://www.nytimes.com/1981/06/30/world/british-uneasy-over-irish-cancel-visit-to-us-by-princess-margaret.html
Jim Buck
What is it that you approve of? pl
Col Lang,
Sorry about the missing Link – This is about the Guccifer 2.0 leaks and the story of the “Russian hacking” of the DNC – Guccifer2.0: Game Over