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UK politics: The tale of an old (Ber)crow who flew down from the cuckoo's nest...


A Horse Named Stranger

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1 minute ago, Gorn said:

There is already a third party with a strong pro-Remain stance, Liberal Democrats. In the last election, they went all-in on this issue during the campaign, while Labour basically ignored it.  Result? Lib Dems lost 0.5% of vote, while Labour gained 9.6%.

This was not long after the ref when a lot of remainers might have still thought their was a chance we could get a reasonable deal thus respecting the vote and before the full extent of electerail law breaking was known.

 

Also lib dems where being punished for Nick Clegg and tuition fees and the coalition with the Tories 

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22 minutes ago, Mosi Mynn said:

Well quite.  But nobody else is doing anything.  In that vacuum she is the only one "leading".

No, that's not how things work. If nobody else is leading, that doesn't mean you are. Sometimes, nobody is leading. 

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59 minutes ago, mormont said:

No, that's not how things work. If nobody else is leading, that doesn't mean you are. Sometimes, nobody is leading. 

Then I think she is leading.  

It's not impressive, I grant you, but I think she is trying to pull together ideas and forge ahead to accomplish some sort of agreement.  I don't know what else she could do within the restrictions and parameters of the situation - maybe she is being inflexible, maybe that's her style, maybe more compromise would be a better, but she seems to be the only one offering a direction.  If May quits, who takes over and how?  What is Corbyn's plan or solution?  I don't see anyone else offering or capable to lead on this.

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Hilary Benn summed up May's leadership today -  'My door is open, but my mind is closed' 
 

She's just running down the clock now for my-deal Versus no-deal vote. This effort to call in other parties while having nothing she can compromise on is pointless and time wasting

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2 minutes ago, Mosi Mynn said:

I think she is trying to pull together ideas and forge ahead to accomplish some sort of agreement. 

You're entitled to think that, but the facts don't really back you up. This 'consultation' is pretty clearly a sham: far from trying to 'pull together ideas', May has established as a precondition the exclusion of almost all alternative ideas, and that the only agreement she will consider is other people agreeing with her. 

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Just now, mormont said:

You're entitled to think that, but the facts don't really back you up. This 'consultation' is pretty clearly a sham: far from trying to 'pull together ideas', May has established as a precondition the exclusion of almost all alternative ideas, and that the only agreement she will consider is other people agreeing with her. 

Which could be seen as leadership!

I'm assuming, perhaps naively, that after two years of negotiating with the EU she has some idea of what they will be receptive to.  If the deadline in March is fixed, it's been left too late to debate and consider all alternatives.

(Can't believe I'm defending May, but wherever her steel comes from - ambition, stubbornness, megalomania - it's in stark contrast to the wishy washnyness from across the Commons.) 

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Yup, Brandon Lewis getting interviewed this morning on Radio 4 was repeatedly asked what will May move on, will she compromise on Customs Union? (nope) on a 2nd ref (nope) on removing no-deal? (nope) - so what is the point of any of the other parties walking through the frost to Number 10 today? She'll just sit there, listen and change nothing. 

She's going to keep bringing her deal back again and again until she hopes they panic and vote for it. The EU won't change the Withdrawal Agreement so all that will change is more and more comforting words in letters. Pointless. 

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24 minutes ago, Mosi Mynn said:

Which could be seen as leadership!

In what conceivable way could it be seen as leadership? 

May doesn't have 'steel'. Refusing to resign isn't 'steel', it's just self-interest. The best summary of the situation is this: despite the fact that it is palpably obvious that Parliament does not have confidence in the government, having repeatedly defeated it and resoundingly rejected its flagship and indeed only real policy proposal, there are around a hundred MPs willing to pretend they have confidence in the government because that's how much they hate Jeremy Corbyn. 

May is supremely irrelevant to her own survival. 

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I have no doubt that self-interest plays a part - as it does with all politicians.  But I don't think it's just that - she is determined to see this through.  I think that requires some steel.

She could have quit, like the Brexit secretaries, and I don't think anyone would blame her - and many would probably have welcomed it.  But she's kept coming back despite everything that has been thrown at her.  I can't bhelp but admire that.

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3 hours ago, mormont said:

A few misunderstandings here. First of all, there is no such thing as a 'managed No Deal'. Doesn't exist. Can't exist. It is a pure fantasy, and we got to this stage by telling people they could have fantasy deals, so let's not do that again.

Thank you for this.  Because, like many a commentator on the BBC and elsewhere, I too couldn't wrap a brain around that concept: if there is no deal how is a vacancy, an absence, a nothing 'managed?'  Or, as many a commentator points out, the Eurozone nations have no investment or interest in assisting Britain work out her own idiocy. Well, they didn't exactly use that term, idiocy, but that's what they said.  It's her problem, not theirs.

In the meantime, Macron's begun implementing France's plans to deal with the No Deal Hard Brexit on France's end.  Presumably the rest of the EU nations are doing the same.  And Britain blubbers in its own evacuations.

 

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24 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Thank you for this.  Because, like many a commentator on the BBC and elsewhere, I too couldn't wrap a brain around that concept: if there is no deal how is a vacancy, an absence, a nothing 'managed?'  Or, as many a commentator points out, the Eurozone nations have no investment or interest in assisting Britain work out her own idiocy. Well, they didn't exactly use that term, idiocy, but that's what they said.  It's her problem, not theirs.

In the meantime, Macron's begun implementing France's plans to deal with the No Deal Hard Brexit on France's end.  Presumably the rest of the EU nations are doing the same.  And Britain blubbers in its own evacuations.

I assume "managed" no deal means a no deal that Britain has some time to prepare for, just as Macron is doing now in France.  No deal is going to be a mess no matter what, but a few months to prepare could at least mitigate some of the biggest problems. 

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38 minutes ago, Maithanet said:

I assume "managed" no deal means a no deal that Britain has some time to prepare for bombing the Irish Unionists, just as Macron is doing now in France.  No deal is going to be a mess no matter what, but a few months to prepare could at least mitigate some of the biggest problems. 

Fixed that!  :cheers: :idea:

This is an interesting perspective on the mess:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/opinion/sunday/brexit-ireland-empire.html?

Quote

 

The Malign Incompetence of the British Ruling Class
With Brexit, the chumocrats who drew borders from India to Ireland are getting a taste of their own medicine.

Describing Britain’s calamitous exit from its Indian empire in 1947, the novelist Paul Scott wrote that in India the British “came to the end of themselves as they were” — that is, to the end of their exalted idea about themselves. Scott was among those shocked by how hastily and ruthlessly the British, who had ruled India for more than a century, condemned it to fragmentation and anarchy; how Louis Mountbatten, accurately described by the right-wing historian Andrew Roberts as a “mendacious, intellectually limited hustler,” came to preside, as the last British viceroy of India, over the destiny of some 400 million people.

Britain’s rupture with the European Union is proving to be another act of moral dereliction by the country’s rulers. The Brexiteers, pursuing a fantasy of imperial-era strength and self-sufficiency, have repeatedly revealed their hubris, mulishness and ineptitude over the past two years. Though originally a “Remainer,” Prime Minister Theresa May has matched their arrogant obduracy, imposing a patently unworkable timetable of two years on Brexit and laying down red lines that undermined negotiations with Brussels and doomed her deal to resoundingly bipartisan rejection this week in Parliament....

It is a measure of English Brexiteers’ political acumen that they were initially oblivious to the volatile Irish question and contemptuous of the Scottish one. Ireland was cynically partitioned to ensure that Protestant settlers outnumber native Catholics in one part of the country. The division provoked decades of violence and consumed thousands of lives. It was partly healed in 1998, when a peace agreement removed the need for security and customs checks along the British-imposed partition line....

....Politicians and journalists in Ireland are understandably aghast over the aggressive ignorance of English Brexiteers. Business people everywhere are outraged by their cavalier disregard for the economic consequences of new borders. But none of this would surprise anyone who knows of the unconscionable breeziness with which the British ruling class first drew lines through Asia and Africa and then doomed the people living across them to endless suffering....

 

 

 

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1 hour ago, Maithanet said:

I assume "managed" no deal means a no deal that Britain has some time to prepare for, just as Macron is doing now in France.  No deal is going to be a mess no matter what, but a few months to prepare could at least mitigate some of the biggest problems. 

No. What 'managed No Deal' actually is, is a desperate attempt to make No Deal seem less scary than it will in practice be. What its proponents say it is, is some sort of process where we go out without a deal, but somehow make side arrangements on specific issues which will limit the damage. Nobody, however, can explain exactly what will be agreed and how, or how it will limit the damage. It's yet another fantasy solution which can't work in practice and on which nobody has done any work beyond five minutes on the toilet coming up with a vague concept. 

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2 minutes ago, mormont said:

No. What 'managed No Deal' actually is, is a desperate attempt to make No Deal seem less scary than it will in practice be. What its proponents say it is, is some sort of process where we go out without a deal, but somehow make side arrangements on specific issues which will limit the damage. Nobody, however, can explain exactly what will be agreed and how, or how it will limit the damage. It's yet another fantasy solution which can't work in practice and on which nobody has done any work beyond five minutes on the toilet coming up with a vague concept. 

I have no idea how people can deferenciate between a deal breaxit and a managed no deal. In order to have a managed no deal you have to have some sort of agreement… Even if it is temporary you can t have a managed no deal if EU and UK don t arrive at some kind of agreement about brexit...

It sounds like brexiters have realized a deal is impossible and are preparing the way for a no deal and an excuse to have more time to exit the EU (nobody sane would agree to more time to try to achevie a deal we all know simply can t happen).

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1 hour ago, Maithanet said:

I assume "managed" no deal means a no deal that Britain has some time to prepare for, just as Macron is doing now in France. 

Funny how time seems to run at different speed for different nations: What we experience as two terrestrial years is apparently a much shorter timeperiod on the UK government planet. So in the same period where terrestrial nations can plan and prepare for "no deal", the UK government can barely get out of bed.

 

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19 minutes ago, Alarich II said:

Funny how time seems to run at different speed for different nations: What we experience as two terrestrial years is apparently a much shorter timeperiod on the UK government planet. So in the same period where terrestrial nations can plan and prepare for "no deal", the UK government can barely get out of bed.

 

Well other EU nations can keep all their trade deals and regulatory alignment and frictionless movement so don't have as much to prepare as the UK who will lose all that I guess. 

To create a 'managed no-deal' that puts all the new infrastructure needed through the planning system, construct it and staff it and create whole new regulatory regimes for everything from nature conservation areas to medical research to electricity grids would take a budget of billions and about 3 decades or more. Really to have a 'managed no-deal' the UK should have started in 1982. 

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6 hours ago, Gorn said:

There is already a third party with a strong pro-Remain stance, Liberal Democrats. In the last election, they went all-in on this issue during the campaign, while Labour basically ignored it.  Result? Lib Dems lost 0.5% of vote, while Labour gained 9.6%.

Trueish.

The LibDems were more or less burned by Clegg and his broken tuition fee pledge and going to bed with the Tories. And Labour's boost was to not a small degree from remain voters, who wanted to stop the Tories from just implementing whatever Brexit they liked. So with regards to Brexit, Corbyn's strategic ambivalence paid, as it kept Leavers onboard, without alienating Remainers. Add to that, that Tories were punished for a lot of other things, namely austerity measures, which has affected British life in a lot of ways. Homelessness figures, an NHS on its knees etc. The Tories were probably not helped with the dementia tax in their manifesto (or Boris admitting his NHS lie the very next day after the referendum). Add to that the British FPTP electoral system.

However Corbyn's strategic ambivalence has outlived its usefullness. He is not seen as running circles around an utterly shambolic goverment, and him and Labour are not dominating the Tories in the polls. I've said it a few times already, Corbyn's entire platform only works as long as he is able to string along (Labour) remainers, and he won't escape responsibility when the UK goes off the cliff.

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