‘Twas Austerity That Did It.

“Yes, the victorious campaign to leave the European Union won on the basis of xenophobia and the demonization of immigrants. For anyone of a cosmopolitan bent it’s a terrible outcome…But if you tell people you know what’s best for them for years and years while their prospects wither and their lives are immiserated, at some point you should expect some kind of reaction.”

In the Prospect, David Dayen explains how deficit-witch-hunting and hubris paved the way for Brexit. particularly David Cameron and the Tories’ “general belief in expansionary austerity, that you could cut your way to prosperity. For those that don’t recall, this led to the brink of a triple-dip recession, and terrible growth numbers for years and years…What Leave offers, a toxic stew of isolation and racism, isn’t any good either. But when elites spend this long doing nothing for large swathes of the population, they’re willing to listen to anyone with a different idea.”

Since the UK’s faceplant last week, there’s been some talk (and. for some, wishful thinking) that Brexit is the prelude to Trump, fact-free appeals and all, and lord knows we spent far too much time of late playing the austerity game also. But I’ll stand by my “nope, not gonna happen” prediction here: The UK electorate is 90% white, America’s is one-third non-white — That’s a big difference, and the same sorts of nativist appeals just aren’t going to play here anymore — which I am very thankful for.

Still, Brexit is another sterling example of how, when people are justifiably angry about being screwed over, many of them may not vote in their best interests. And it’s emblematic of one of the more insightful comments I’ve heard recently about 2016 (and unfortunately I can’t figure out where I first saw it): When you have Latin American levels of inequality, you’ll end up with Latin American politics.

Brick by Brick.

“These days the holy grail is an octopus or a dragon. I only know of three octopuses being found, and one was by me, in a cave in Challaborough, Devon. It’s quite competitive. If you heard that your neighbour had found a green dragon, you’d want to go out and find one yourself.”

By way of Dangerous Meta, BBC briefly looks into the Lego infestation of Cornwall. “[On February 13th, 1997] 62 containers were lost overboard about 20 miles off Land’s End – and one of them was filled with nearly 4.8m pieces of Lego, bound for New York…shortly after that some of those Lego pieces began washing up in both the north and south coasts of Cornwall. They’re still coming in today.”

Keep Calm and…Oh, Never Mind.

“We all know that the dangers facing us today are greater by far than at any time in our long history. The enemy is not the soldier with his rifle nor even the airman prowling the skies above our cities and towns but the deadly power of abused technology. But whatever terrors lie in wait for us, all the qualities that have helped to keep our freedom intact twice already during this sad century will once more be our strength.”

Along the lines of Richard Nixon’s paean to the fallen Apollo 11 astronauts, a draft, circa 1983, is unearthed of Queen Elizabeth’s potential remarks on the start of World War III. “The moving words were written by an imaginative speech writer taking part in a disaster planning exercise.”

Potemkin Prosperity.

“What they’ve done is they have filled the shop front window with a picture of what was the business before it went bankrupt or closed. In other words, grocery shops, butcher shops, pharmacies, you name it, they have placed large photographs in the windows that if you were driving past and glanced out the window, it would look as if this was a thriving business. It’s an attempt really by the local authority to make the place look as positive as possible for the visiting G8 leaders and their entourages, and it’s really tried to put a mask on a recession that has really hit this part of Ireland really very badly indeed.”

Not from The Onion: The Northern Ireland town of Enniskillen preps for the G8 summit by constructing a Potemkin village untouched by Britain’s disastrous austerity measures. “This is one big initiative really stemming from the Foreign Office in London. This is David Cameron’s gig. It’s his invitation, it’s his decision to host the G8 in County Fermanagh, which is, don’t forget, part of the United Kingdom.”

London Falling.

“[M]aybe they’re all working off out-of-date history books, and think they’re invading the nerve centre of an empire covering a quarter of the globe. In the event that the nation’s favourite Time Lord ever fails to repel them, the Daleks are going to be deeply embarrassed to discover that all they’ve won possession of is a slightly rainy archipelago full of financial services professionals and sarcasm.”

With that Douglas Adams-y pronouncement, Londonist offers a handy Google Map of all the places in London where Doctor Who has saved the city. “We’ve also, because we’re nice like that, colour coded them by which Doctor it was that defeated them.”

Oh Maggie, what did we do?

“Well I hope I don’t die too soon, I pray the lord my soul to save. Because there’s one thing I know, I’d like to live long enough to savor. That’s when they finally put you in the ground, Ill stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down.” The soundtrack for today was written decades ago: I went with Elvis (who talks about this song here), but could just as easily have gone with Morrissey or Pink Floyd or Sinead O’Connor or a whole host of others.

In any case, Margaret Thatcher, 1925-2013. As I said when Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms passed, I’m of the Hunter Thompson on Nixon school when it comes to political obits. Let’s not diminish what Thatcher passionately stood for throughout her life by engaging in ridiculous happy talk at the moment of her death.

This Prime Minister has lot to answer for, from bringing free market absolutism and trickle-down voodoo economics to England, with all the readily preventable inequality it generated, to supporting dictators and tyrants around the world — Pinochet, Botha, the Khmer Rouge — to, of course, the Falklands War.

Much as with Reagan here in America, England still lives under Thatcher’s shadow. To quote today’s Guardian, “her legacy is of public division, private selfishness and a cult of greed, which together shackle far more of the human spirit than they ever set free.” But to her credit, at least Thatcher (a chemist by training) was very vocal about the threat of climate change in the last years of her life.

Update: Salon‘s Alex Pareene has more evidence for the prosecution, including graphs of the rise of inequality and poverty on Thatcher’s watch:

“Britain no longer ‘makes’ much of anything, and when those lost jobs were replaced, they were replaced with low-wage, no-security service industry work…Really, it’s hard to argue with former London mayor Ken Livingstone, who remembered Thatcher on Sky News yesterday: ‘She created today’s housing crisis. She created the banking crisis. And she created the benefits crisis…In actual fact, every real problem we face today is the legacy of the fact that she was fundamentally wrong.'” (Last quote also birddogged by Dangerous Meta.)

What the Words Obscured.

“There is nothing the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences loves more than movies about people with physical or mental disabilities (or addictions)…If the afflicted protagonist also happens to be royal — as in The Madness of King George (1994) — so much the better, for a suffering crowned head bestows an extra touch of class on Hollywood’s uplifting formula of brave triumph over cruel adversity.“

So, apparently, a stammer was the least of King George VI’s worries. As the Oscar field is announced with The King’s Speech at the head of the pack, Martin Filler muckrakes the rest of the King George story in The New York Review of Books, and Christopher Hitchens piles on over at Slate: “The King’s Speech is an extremely well-made film with a seductive human interest plot, very prettily calculated to appeal to the smarter filmgoer and the latent Anglophile. But it perpetrates a gross falsification of history.“

In the Land of the Blind…

“Each has a single eye (actually, a camera), a light on their heads representing a London taxi cab and bracelets that represent the five Olympic rings. Their amorphous, aerodynamic shapes make them look like science-fiction versions of Gumby.“

Continuing a hallowed tradition of Olympic mascot #fail — Fret not, Iz’, you’re still the worst — the London 2012 powers-that-be unleash Wenlock and Mandeville, the 2012 Olympic mascots. Like other Olympic mascots, Wenlock and Mandeville are meant to evoke the spirit of the Games and the host country, but also connect children with sports. At first glance, these non-mammalian characters seem far from achieving those goals.“

Birds of a Feather.

“Could I offer one piece of serious advice?…Start thinking now about you want your legacy to be.” Having made peace with The Queen, Tony Blair (Michael Sheen once more) now contends with President Bill and First Lady Hillary Clinton (Dennis Quaid and Hope Davis respectively) in this brief teaser for Richard Loncraine’s The Special Relationship, written by Peter Morgan. (This is the fifth Morgan/Sheen collaboration after The Deal, The Queen, Frost/Nixon, and The Damned United.) With this, Treme, The Pacific, Song of Ice and Fire, and Boardwalk Empire, the reasons for re-subscribing to HBO seem to be mounting.

When the Dust Clears, Tories on Top.

“‘I have been privileged to learn much about the very best in human nature, and a fair amount, too, about its frailties, including my own,’ he said. Brown said he loved the job — ‘not for its prestige, its titles and its ceremony, which I do not love at all. No, I loved the job for its potential to make the country I love fairer, more tolerant, more green, more democratic, more prosperous and more just.’“

After a cantankerous election that got positively (In the) loopy at times (or, if you prefer, Coakley-esque), Prime Minister Gordon Brown has resigned, ending thirteen years of Labor rule, and Conservative David Cameron is the new PM of a coalition Tory-Liberal Democrat government. [Bio.]

According to E.J. Dionne, “Cameron’s decision to ally with the Lib Dems could have a far-reaching impact on his own party. Many on the right end of the Tory Party are wary of the alliance — a mirror of the reaction on the Labour left. Cameron’s eagerness for a deal suggests he really may want to remake the Conservative Party along more progressive lines. I guess we’ll soon find out.

Update: Speaking of In the Loop, the man himself, Armando Ianucci, weighs in: “Nnnyaaaaaghwooohaaooooororarararararghhhhhhh. That’s the message the electorate gave on Thursday. A long, angry, discordant noise that eventually became silly…[F]or a result that so perfectly expresses the public’s mounting mix of contempt, confusion, and sheer bloody-minded desire to see the political classes sit down to eat humble pie, stand up to get thwacked on the head with the remainder, and then shoved into a corner to be locked in a dark cupboard to sit in their own mess, Thursday’s result was sheer comic genius.“