EU extends a hand (or two) to Joe Biden – By David M. Herszenhorn

In a sign of just how eager Brussels is to move past the acrimony created by President Donald Trump, the European Commission and Council have put forward competing policy papers outlining how they would like the EU to team up with the new U.S. administration on a wide array of policy issues.

Read more at: EU extends a hand (or two) to Joe Biden – POLITICO

Britain-Brexit: Boris Johnson suffers Commons defeat as Tories turn against him - by Heather Stewart and Peter Walker

Boris Johnson has announced he will ask parliament to support plans for a snap October general election after suffering a humiliating defeat in his first House of Commons vote as prime minister.

Former cabinet ministers including Philip Hammond and David Gauke were among 21 Tory rebels who banded together with opposition MPs to seize control of the parliamentary timetable on a dramatic day in Westminster.

The move was aimed at paving the way for a bill tabled by the Labour backbencher Hilary Benn, which is designed to block a no-deal Brexit by forcing the prime minister to request an extension to article 50 if he cannot strike a reworked deal with the EU27.

Johnson lost the vote by 328 to 301, a convincing majority for the rebels of 27.

The PM had earlier described the legislation, drawn up by a cross-party coalition including the senior Tories Oliver Letwin and Dominic Grieve, as “Jeremy Corbyn’s surrender bill”.

After his defeat, Johnson said he would never request the delay mandated in the rebels’ bill, which he said would “hand control of the negotiations to the EU”.

If MPs passed the bill on Wednesday, he said, “the people of this country will have to choose” in an election that he would seek to schedule for 15 October.

Read more at: Boris Johnson suffers Commons defeat as Tories turn against him | Politics | The Guardian

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EU elections: Forward or backward, decision time

Forward or backward? Decision time in the EU https://p.dw.com/p/3IkdC

The British Election: Tales of the unexpected -by Rodney Barker

In Britain the Conservatives have recognised this more consistently than have their opponents, though the left in the Twentieth Century had a readily demonisable, and readily demonised, target in Margaret Thatcher. In campaigning attacks the Conservatives have gone for the player, not the ball, and still have as well a residue of ruling class disdain for anyone who lies outside either their own charmed circle or beyond the frontiers of currently dominant narratives and ideology. Even to wear the ‘wrong’ clothes can provoke a sneer. They have concentrated on personal attacks on potential rivals, and on presenting a narrative of their opponents as marginal, untypical, out of touch with the mass of voters. This story, like the story about markets, liberal economics, and austerity, has been sustained by the power of ideological carpet bombing, and the marginalisation of alternatives in the tyranny of received opinion.

This goes a long way to explaining one of the many curious features of the 2017 General Election. When the decision to go to the country was made, the predominant media narrative was of a Labour Party doomed to virtual extinction, massively behind in the polls, likely to virtually disappear from parliamentary politics. And if nothing changed, and the current narrative were both correct and unchallenged, that would be true. But things do change, choices are made, and the impossible becomes possible by someone choosing ‘unrealistic’ policies and making ‘unrealistic’ claims and giving ‘out of date’ or (and that’s the alternative) ‘fantastic’ narratives.

But once campaigning began, something happened which took this dominant and pervasive account by surprise. Up until then, the prevailing account of the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn had been of an unrealistic, extremist, out of touch and old-fashioned.

Once the campaign began, and some account had to be given of the Labour manifesto, and some reporting on the Labour leader’s speeches, it was difficult for a predominantly right wing media entirely to ignore Corbyn, whose values and aims – a simple rejection of austerity on both moral and economic grounds, a belief in the central importance of properly funded public services from health to railways, a rejection of a taxation system which let large corporations off lightly and prioritized making thing better for the wealthy – suddenly seemed sensible and modest not just to actual and potential Labour voters, but to ordinary citizens beyond the left. Corbyn slowly but transformingly was presented and could be seen as someone who, at last, attacked an entire system of privilege and inequality and extreme economic ideologies. He was no longer the impractical leader of an out of date party, but a champion of public services in health, education, and transport, services which were valued by ordinary voters, the many not the few, and a fundamental context for their wellbeing. A manifesto which had been anticipated as a recipe for disaster became the prospectus of a party which seemed every day to narrow the gap.

Read more: mThe UK General Election: Tales of the unexpected | Euronews