Westminstenders Contines. Boris outmaneovered everyone?! Now War and Peace?

[RedToothBrush]

THE BREXIT FALLOUT CONTINUES - THREAD TEN

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This set of threads started out asking if Boris had been outmanoeuvred by Cameron handing him a poison chalice. Fate made it seem as if Boris lost the battle but May has confounded everyone and handed him a second chance. Or so it might seem.

May now has a new Cabinet after a sweeping cull of Cameron's lot. It is more right wing than in a generation. A number of appointments have raised eyebrows. There are plenty of poison chalices and plenty of Brexiteers. Will this create peace in the Tory ranks? Or is it just the calm before the storm

Labour are tearing themselves apart what now seems to be all out civil war. Talk of gerrymandering, violence, disenfranchisement, deselection and intimidation are rife. The seems to be no end in sight, and no prospect of a solution apparent. The question perhaps seems to be when and how, rather than if the party will split, and who will retain the name and party funds.

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So the sad face of British politics in the last two days can be summed up in a single image. Boris and a brick.

Depressed?

I think we have a while to go yet before we hit the bottom.

Excuse me with the intros as I'm starting to struggle to keep up with things myself

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/eu_referendum_2016_/2684990-The-Westminster-Hunger-Games-Contines-May-Day-May-Day Previous Thread Nine

BBC Radio 4 Today Verified account @BBCr4today
"Too soon to set out exact timetable" on when Article 50 will be triggered, says Defence Sec Michael Fallon

Yes tiggytape, I wasn't saying that either in or out were possible or preferable, just that once the details of a leave deal is known, that levels of satisfaction might be greater if we stay in, than if we leave.

Yes - of the three options potentially on the table, the one that satisfies the most people is actually remaining.

There is no political room to countenance this right now, of course. I'm not sure at all what to make of May; the simplest reading of her appointments and statements so far is that she expects brexit to fail and she intends to lay the blame at the feet of the "three brexiteers" or, failing that, the SNP.

I think RedToothBrush might be on to something with her theory about Davis being about to found the United Federation of Planets.

After all, his Cabinet colleague Philip Hammond argued that one of the reasons we were "better together" during the IndyRef was "threats from space"

Do they know something we don't?

A couple of thoughts.

I think a GE would be the best way to reconstruct the LP as then there would be a significant reshuffling of the PLP especially if a mechanism for reselections is triggered by the current shenanigans. This may be the only reason TM may choose not to pursue it. It is far from certain she would consolidate her majority if UKIP or the Lib/Dem made enough inroads.

I don't think a referendum rerun is possible because the EU have already started the process of throwing us out and are showing no desire to do otherwise.

Even in Scotland I do not accept the vote was resoundingly Remain. 25% of the electorate are Tory and they voted Remain on RD's orders to protect the UK Union primarily - I presume they are as equivocal as the rest of UK Tories on the EU question in isolation. This also implies the 38% Leave vote came primarily from the Left in Scotland (there is no significant UKIP). In other words Scottish Labour who are Internationalist and the hard core of the SNP who are Isolationist. NS is having to be extremely nimble to keep both SNP wings on side. That is why I think the most likely outcome and the one with the mandate is a more constitutionally satisfactory Federal settlement and a variable relationship for Scotland with the EU outside of membership.

*I read an interesting article in Le Figaro today. Admittedly my French is GCSE, but from what I understood, Brexit has caused the us to back off from the ttip deal they've been negotiating for years and come back with worse terms in both customs and regulatory approvals.
*
I saw this comment upthread.

Is it is the case that the EU will have to renegotiate prospective and even existing trade agreements to reflect the absence of the massive economy that is the UK?

If so, will this improve the chances of negotiations being aimed at keeping the UK very close or even reforms aimed to help us stay after all?

I'm hoping that on both sides time will help to reveal how much would be lost and we will find a way to pull back from the brink.

Even in Scotland I do not accept the vote was resoundingly Remain. 25% of the electorate are Tory and they voted Remain on RD's orders to protect the UK Union primarily - I presume they are as equivocal as the rest of UK Tories on the EU question in isolation.

What do you base this assertion on? In England, Tory voters came out strongly in favour of leave, despite remaining being official party policy. Is there any research on how Tory voters in Scotland voted?

Going back to the LibDem discussion, I am a floating LibDem/Labour voter and I voted for a LD MP who was part of the coalition government.
I personally swung away from LD in the last election for the simple reason that I would never willingly have voted conservative yet that is effectively how I voted in that election. We are not used to coalitions so I think many people simply felt cheated that their vote meant something different to how they intended it.
Hindsight of how the LDs tempered the Conservatives in coalition and recent events with Labour have made me reconsider now though.

LOL

Greenpeace UK (@GreenpeaceUK)
July 18, 2016
BREAKING: we’ve acquired the Brexit battlebus & rebranding it w/ messages for new government. Will they #ComeClean? pic.twitter.com/AW4fwf2rG9

Misti I linked to the electoral commission breakdown of the results in one of the earlier threads. If you map the conservative voting areas they have by far the highest Remain vote in Scotland eg East Renf. The Lib / Dem areas, as you would expect were also very strongly Remain.

Anecdotally I have my very own Unionist Tory voting DM and all her friends and they were all Remain. She is not a member but she does a lot of leafleting etc for her Tory MSP and councillor, so I think is a fairly reliable barometer. In common with a lot of older Scottish conservatives her viewpoint is that the status quo is the lowest risk and is therefore conservative in all senses of the word. I take after my DF and his anti establishment tendencies

This is not being highlighted by any Scottish politician because it would be awkward for both SNP and Labour and RD will always put the Union first as will her voters.

Misti I linked to the electoral commission breakdown of the results in one of the earlier threads. If you map the conservative voting areas they have by far the highest Remain vote in Scotland eg East Renf. The Lib / Dem areas, as you would expect were also very strongly Remain.

Ok, thanks (sorry, no chance of me RTFT in this case, there is too much of it).

I guess that it's not fundamentally surprising given that Tory voters in Scotland are probably a rather different demographic to the UK, much more conservative with a small c. It's clear that voting patterns in Scotland were fundamentally quite different to those in England. I wonder how many of the leave votes were by people with strong nationalist beliefs who thought that a leave vote was a route to a second indyref?

Misti that is what I also wonder but it is harder to unpick. The only meaningful Leave campaigning in Scotland came from Jim Sillars who is very much old school SNP. It was telling for me that in her first post Brexit vote speech to the Scottish Parliament NS acknowledged the need to represent all Scots including the 38% who voted Leave.

With the country so divided it is impossible - at the moment - to find a solution that is the # 1 preference for a majority.
Even if Remain now probably have a very narrow majority, it's too soon dor the HoC to reject the vote of the referendum.

So we are llooking for a compromise that a majority would accept, in preference to all the other alternatives.

Of course Remainers wanted Remain, not soft Brexit
And for Leavers, immigration was #1 or #2 was ⅔ of them, so ⅔ of theat 52%

Currently, over 60% of all vioters prioritise a single market - shorthand for saving the economy - and only a third prioritise stopping EU immigration.
So, it suggests that of all the possible Brexits, the EEA option is the preferred Brexit of a majority

When the terms if a deal are clearer - what it will really cost the country - then Remain may be back on the table.
However, at the moment, "Brexit means Brexit" and neither HoC, the SNP or the courts would dare say Remain.

btw, with a GE, voting for a particular political party is also balancing one manifesto of umpteen policies vs another manifesto - there are very few GE voters who get the exact set of policies they want and who also don't miss out on a policy from other parties that they would like, but that their chosen party doesn't include.

I think it's a bit more complex than that in Scotland.

I know of people who voted Leave despite believing in the EU so that they could "wipe that smug grin off Nicola's face" (direct quote - and heard other comments of the same ilk ) assuming that Remain would win bet they're feeling sick

I also know an ardent Leaver who is also a strong supporter of Independence (got to know her via MN during the Indyref campaign). She objects to the EU on the basis of bureaucracy and constraints on trade/nationalised industries (not saying I agree with her, but she has passionate arguments not based on immigration). although I did meet one Leave voter who was doing so because of the immigrants in Kent

I also know SNP members who are vehemently against TTIP and voted Leave because of that (no amount of explaining that we were more likely to experience the worst of TTIP via the Tories outwith the EU would convince them).

As in England, there will be a plethora of reasons why people voted the way that they did.

The only thing I would add is that the "Remain" politicians (of all colours) up here tried to keep the arguments about the EU more positive (couldn't do anything about the negativity of the UK wide campaign on MSM which is beamed direct into every house with a TV licence).

This was how Kirsty Blackman, MP for Aberdeen North put it in a Facebook post on 23 June. Note how it's all positive (except for the last statement )

"Why should we stay in the EU?

It keeps us safer. It has made rules about how many hours we can work, about protecting us at work and has encouraged cooperation across Europe, protecting us from warfare.

It makes us more equal. We have the right to fair treatment, no matter what gender or race we are. We have the right to travel to EU countries to live and work in them.

It makes us more prosperous. We are part of a very large market. Trade is easier, both within the EU and without. Our rural and more marginalised areas receive EU funding to support them.

We are greener. Our planet is protected by the EU.

A leave vote means handing all of this to the Tories. How long will our protections last then? Vote Remain today."

To be fair on Ruth Davidson, she emphasised pretty much the same points (with perhaps a little less emphasis on workers' rights )

I wonder if one of the reasons there was a lower turnout in Scotland was because there was a general sense it would be Remain here, so there wasn't the same need to get out and vote. But even if the turnout had been at the same level as in England, and every single one of those extra voters had voted Remain, it wouldn't have changed the overall result.

Plus we'd just had an election and some people do get "voting" fatigue.

As you know, I am 100% a remainer - but I'm still surprised to keep finding out how much of our everyday life and GDP etc etc was tied up into the EU. I wonder if it's even possible to properly disentangle ourselves from them. Did no one at the start ever think "What if we leave?"

InShockReally ditto. I think many Leavers and Remainers are surprised by this.

An interesting Scottish LP development. Ian Murray, the only Labour MP in Scotland has just been appointed by KD as her Westminster representative. A positive development in the reality of Scottish Labour being very different from English Labour. Just a pity he is on the wrong side of the upcoming Trident vote in terms of actually representing the Scottish Labour electorate. I fully expect Angus Robertson and the rest of the SNP to make great political capital at his expense

I'm not surprised by it.

It's why I find the situation we find ourselves in so ridiculous.

But that is partly a function of my work.

Also partly a function of being from another country without a poisonous media that has been telling lies about Europe for decades, and a body politic that has cynically blamed the EU for non-EU matters for just as long.

The level of basic ignorance of the EU amongt the English population wS really very striking pre-Brexit.

At least TM seems to be trying to do the right thing, with immediate visits to Scotland and Wales, (but she needs to make one to NI pdq, and Gibraltar, I imagine), plus visits to Merkel and Hollande.

On the subject of voter ignorance, here's a quote from www.lordashcroftpolls.com/2016/06/how-the-united-kingdom-voted-and-why

More than three quarters (77%) of those who voted to remain thought “the decision we make in the referendum could have disastrous consequences for us as a country if we get it wrong”. More than two thirds (69%) of leavers, by contrast, thought the decision “might make us a bit better or worse off as a country, but there probably isn’t much in it either way”.

Oneart, not sure what that tells us given everyone will have different ideas of what is a disasters us consequence. I think rise of far right is disastrous consequence but I doubt UKIP or right wing Tory voters particularly thinks so.

Off topic but as you're such a politically interested bunch.

The second reading of the Higher Education and Research Bill is tomorrow (Tuesday 19 July). Please can you contact your MP and ask them to attend Parliament on Tuesday to vote against this Bill?

^According to the UCL UCU, if the Bill is passed in its current form it will

• introduce a new TEF premised on metrics which, the Royal Statistical Society point out, do not correlate with actual quality measures
• allow new companies to become "universities" and gain degree-awarding powers extremely quickly and easily
• remove Privy Council's involvement in accreditation and supervision of statute reform, reducing protections for academic freedom
• dissolve research councils and innovate UK into one institution, UKRI^

The post-Brexit situation is already incredibly challenging for UK universities, as it is likely to impact on both student numbers and EU research funding. The last thing that is needed in the sector is more uncertainty, less control and more interference.

Thanks

Thegirl I agree it could be telling us more than one thing... but it does seem to imply that a lot of voters underestimated the extent of the impact.

inshock I thought it would be horrendously complicated and now I'm more worried than ever.
Partly because the politicians - Leave & Remain - seem so ignorant about the economy and international trade. Incredible !

They seem to think changing the last 40 years is like flicking a switch somewhere in the HoC, rather than several years complicated work by several hundred specialists.
So we have an extra step, while the clock is ticking, that those who are supposed to organise Brexit first learn how the country & the world actually works.

Hard Brexit is like trying to extract the British "egg" from the EU omelette to make a different dish - we're really trying to fit bits of omelette into dishes where this simply doesn't work.
In the meantime making sure noone has to wait too long for supper while the kitchen is in total panic.

Also, there is the potentially huge effect of non-tariff barriers, which are an important part of trade agreements.
Regardless of how much the UK cuts wages & prices, other countries will not permit UK exports to enter at all, unless a complex set of compliance regulations are fulfilled, including for every tiny component - e.g. additives, safety, recycling, documentation
They don't have to accept us saying we stick to the EU regs, because we no longer have the fast-tracking of certifications or "Type Approval" for goods & services, that was part of our EU membership.

Even EEA is not an easy option, since that wouldn't currently include Financial Passporting.
Other EU countries have been trying to grab City of London business, impose Tobin tax etc for years.
They may say we can only have standard EEA, i.e. lose the City business, which would be a terrible loss to the economy and tax income.