Westministenders. Boris we wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy Constitutional Crisis?

[RedToothBrush]

Its twelve days to go until the end of the HoC 2016 calendar and we can already tell that everyone is wishing it was Christmas already. Poor Theresa though, she doesn’t get to play with toys on the last day of term. Instead she has a grilling on the lack of spending on health and social care spending by a commons select committee.

Hopefully the next couple of weeks will calm down a little though as thoughts turn elsewhere.

The A50 case has come to an end. There is no way of telling which way the judges will go but the decision to appeal may yet haunt the government as it will bring the issue of devolution to a head, whether they win or lose. The ruling is due in mid January.

Win and they are going to have to amend the Devolution Acts and potentially impose Brexit on people with certain national identities who voted against it. This is profoundly undemocratic and a betrayal of the principles of Devolution and the expectations of the will of the people.
Lose and they could face a full blown constitutional crisis, with NI or Scotland or both having a veto over Brexit, and the government effectively unable to trigger a50 in line with our constitutional requirement. Which is again, potentially profoundly undemocratic and against the referendum and the expectations of the will of the people.

It was a scenario that predictable and avoidable at several junctions yet the government under Cameron and May ploughed on regardless. It a scenario that we are now locked into, due to deciding to use the courts rather than just go through parliament.

It could also massively restrict the power of the executive under the Royal Prerogative. Ironically this is something that David Davis has campaigned for, for years so I guess he gets a victory however the decision goes.
So the chances of some kind of crisis with regard to our constitutional makeup and the union seem inevitable in the new year.

The government despite a defeat in Richmond Park continues to lean right and characterise anyone with concerns as unpatriotic or not honourable. This is the last resort of the desperate.

They have however, conceded to Labour that they will publish a report on their Brexit plans before a50 is triggered. In return Labour have promised that they will let a50 be triggered by the end of March. Is this a good thing? It remains to be seen. In some ways this is a blinder for Labour.

They are pro-Brexit but anti-lack of plan in theory. This only works if the plan actually has substance. If there is no substance in the plan and its nothing more than empty words then they face having to go back on a commons vote committing them to a deal with the Conservatives. It could therefore be a trap for them. It marginalises the none English Nationalist voices too. Voices that are important and deserve to be heard. Voices that if they are not listened to, will have consequences.

What will the Sleaford and North Hykenham (yep again) by election bring?

A vote of confidence in the government, a new ever growing and rising fear of UKIP or something else. How will this colour the start to the New Year?

I don’t know. 2016 has apparently been the year of gin as people turn to the drink to cope. Everything is now Brexitty and Red, White and Blue.
But whose’s? Britain’s? The USA’s? Russia’s? Or France’s?

We look forward to, or more to the point we fear what 2017 could bring. A feeling we have not felt to this degree in many years. A General Election with a UKIP breakthrough. The end of peace in NI. A repeat of the age old betrayal of Scotland’s by the English. The Welsh damned to irrelevance and marginalisation. Brexit vettoed and the subsequent political fallout. The end of the NHS. A bonfire of rights. A new Italian PM and possibly new Eurozone economic crisis. Fillon or Le Pen and at last a real victory for the far right in Europe. The chance of Merkel’s Last Stand. Putin’s partnership with Assad and a new genocide we are powerless to stop. Erdogan pulling the plug on the EU door and unleashing a new wave of refugees onto European shores. The horror of ISIS both within the West and within the Middle East. Trump’s neo-fascism and rise of a New World Order. There is something in there for everyone to dread.

Which will it be? Probably something we have not yet foreseen such are these times.

Act 2 of Brexit in Westminstenders land is bound to be just as dramatic and of course, we leave 2016 in true soap fashion on a real cliff hanger.

All the more reason to enjoy the holiday period and break whatever your politics.

Hey Red! Nice to see you If you'll excuse a digression into another direction : Buddhist trick: rather than saying to yourself 'I am suffering'. Say 'There is suffering'. It's still there, but we can watch and act on it, rather than be paralysed by it. I know this is not a religious thread, but what's going on is certainly a question of morality.

I promise no more religiousy stuff!

One thing that has kept my hopes alive in the face of what has been going on in the Middle East, and Aleppo is just a very sad manifestation of the experience of a lot of civilians there since the invasion of Iraq, is that I went on holiday to Croatia a couple of years ago. Life there has moved on from war. There are little manifestations, the absence of any signs of the Orthodox community, abandoned vineyards, references to lots of relatives now living in the US, the new tiles on the roofs above the packed tourist hoards of Dubrovnik, but it is easy to forget what happened there. Until I went into a church where the usual memorial had framed photos of all the young people from the town who had died in the fighting, pictures of young men and women forever frozen in the fashions of the 90s.

That war seemed intractable at the time, we watched news coverage of sniper alley in Sarajevo, of the massacres and the war crimes, and yet a solution was found and there is peace and recovery. It took those picture of those young men and women to remember how horrific it was.

Of course the politics are different and it is hard to see a way through the willingness to allow such horrors on the part of Russia, Iran and Assad. However if a way was found in the Bosnian conflict perhaps there is hope the same for the people of the Middle East and that Aleppo will once again be a thriving community, that all those people who have fled and are treated as sub human by the countries they have fled to, and those who bombed them out in the first place, are able to return to rebuild their lives and communities.

Agh. My brexit-voting, Tory uncle has sent a Christmas card expressingthe hope that 2017 won't be more living in interesting times... !!! [Headdesk] [facepalm]

Sorry. Don't know where else to safely rant about it!

Then he starts to talk about Brexit and how European Governments don't seem to be taking it seriously. I don't get what he's saying properly, but the point is he is saying that if they don't act in a certain way the European Commission will handle the negotiations by themselves on behalf of the European Parliament.

My immediate thought was it sounds like an analogous situation the UK is in vis-a-vis Royal Prerogative and parliamentary oversight ... who are the competent bodies in the EU to handle A50 negotiations ?

I promise no more religiousy stuff!

This is a bit like some Christians saying 'this is the will of God' and then trying to accept it. I am not sure that is the correct interpretation though - if we just accepted things we would still have slavery, for example, or would still have been sending children up chimneys and down coal mines.

I agree that you need to watch and act on it.

Sorry to digress to the sound of whalesong, but the idea of dealing with anxiety/fear/stress by observing it from the outside (not "I feel anxious" but "I am observing my anxiety" is a pretty useful mindfulness technique to cope with overwhelming feelings. I have had a lot of practice with this in the middle of the night since the referendum. I recommend the Buddhify app, which is not at all religious and has some great meditations for stress and sleeplessness.

Message ends.

Add to that ron: N Ireland, Germany, South Africa; all in my lifetime. Not perfect, but better. I remember lovely Bishop Tutu on a snowy anti apartheid demo in London in the early eighties. We were cold. But so lucky in so many ways. He sang us all a song to warm us and cheer us up!

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-38319337

The government's plan for Brexit negotiations will not be published until February at the earliest.

(contd)

That''s strange, Misti Your experience working on the continent sounds very different to mine - I've worked there in various industries nearly 30 years, mostly in Germany, from 1987 to this year ( returning to the Uk in my dotage - then decided to move back permanently to Germany after Brexit !)

However, I'm single and childfree, so maybe that avoids most hassle ?

I've been told wherever I work that being monolingual English-speaking is no problem.
Although I've learned reasonable German in the meantime, I've never learned any Swedish, Dutch etc. because the working language is always English - because it's usual to have colleagues from several countries.

Umpteen colleagues over the 30 years, from the Uk, India, Korea etc. none of whom had problems afaik, except that non-EU had to be employed for 6 months before they could bring over spouses & DC.

It's usual to arrive with zero German. Also includes Brits & Americans who've moved to work in Frankfurt financial centre - I meet them at the gym.

Graduates in the large German manufacturing firms where I worked just aren't employed unless they speak English - and they'll have no career unless it's very fluent English.

Also, typically, the staff at my gym, GP, dentist, even sometimes post office and baker speak English, as do random friendly customers who hear my accent.

So it's perfectly possible to live in an expat bubble, just as some groups do in the Uk.
I enjoy experiencing the different cultures.
However, I've always been crap at foreign languages (seriously Aspie scientist; my brain just doesn't work on all channels) My mother's first language was Arabic, but the theory then was only to speak the main language to DC, so I never learned it

I've a huge extended family on my mother's side, who were originally scattered around the Middle East - Coptic Christians - but have all been forced to flee over the last 30 years or so.

Even before the various wars, Christian minorities suffered discrimination and began to feel unsafe. The mc like my family - mostly doctors - were safe for quite a while, but eventually persecution touches everyone, no matter what your resources.

Coptic Christians trace back their ME roots and churches to the earliest centuries AD.
In the early 20th century, Christians were about 20% of the population. This has reduced to 2% and falling now.
So sad.
My mum growing up after WW ONE had at least as much personal freedom - dances, sport etc - as a young mc woman in England at that time.
Girls and women in the ME now have far less freedom than she did, 80 years ago.

I mean my mum in the ME had as much freedom as a woman in England, 80 years ago

I think it depends on the environment.
I have been head hunted for a NOT that glamourous job just because I can speak French and English fluently. All the companies I have worked for in the UK have done so because they needed someone speaking french fluently. It just made things so so much easier (I'm talking manufacturing there)

And yes yes you can live in an expat bubble on the continent. It depends a lot of where you are (I would imagine Frankfurt or Paris will be easier than a small town). I would be mindful of the reactions of the 'locals' though. How many french and Spanish have express how fed up they are to have these British bubbles and entire villages taken over by Brits who want to live in their bubbles...
If this is OK to say that living an insular life wo speaking a word of English in the UK, surely this should be the same for Brits in Europe?

Castel And Cambodia, though the effects of the genocide there are still all too evident. Cambodians over 50 are rare, those that were not killed have terrible health problems but it is a young country trying to come back in spite of the continuing dead hand of those complicit with the Kmer Rouge.

And Liberia, and Sierra Leone, ron Interesting how many MC Nigerians are moving back there too now, despite boku haram.
BCF so interesting your back story, thanks for sharing. Turkey too in 1920s under Ataturk had liberal freedoms for women. India had first female PM? Interesting how times have changed.
Brilliant as social media is, sort of, it's bringing un mitigated and un edited horror onto our phones ( not mine it's not smart) as well as the euphoria that started a lot of current crisis with 'Arab Spring'.

Barack Obama, spoke recently of Kennedy having 2 weeks to ponder the Cuban missile crisis before acting. Thinking before acting, and a chosen lack of the luxury of time, is exacerbating everyone's stress levels. Just pausing for thought might help decision makers and us observers.

Thank you for the mindfulness / Buddhism tips for dealing with anxiety. I'm not at all religious, but these seem very useful. My anxiety levels have gone through the roof since June...

Thanks back missmoon I don't mean to suggest we do nothing, but it's good to feel strong when we do act back/ post back/think back/ speak back. We can. Well, I don't always, but I try!

Ben Bradshaw suggests Russia also interfered in the Brexit referendum and have orchestrated/exacerbated a refugee crisis in Europe. He asks when we are going to wake up to what Russia is up to, which is to divide and destroy western democracies.

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/russian-interference-brexit-highly-probable-referendum-hacking-putin-a7472706.html

And haven't there been rumours about Russian/Ukip connections for a while?

It seems unlikely to me that they wouldn't have interfered, at least via social media.

On a related topic, this piece is interesting: online trolls - just one day and one newspaper - but looks rather familiar.

brexit24.com/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-times-troll/

Thanks kaija, fascinating!

Oh my Kaija! That is really scary and explains much about the spread of misinformation. It's a wonder there are so many remainers left

Very, very interesting, kaija! In relation to that article, I've seen the Mcdonalds line heralded as an example of Brexit success. In fact it was trotted out a lot on the pub thread, where it was greeted with much excitement and repetition of the 'fact' that it would bring massive tax income to the UK.

Yes Castel and Whatwould; also Vietnam is another previous war zone which has recovered. It is now apparently a glorious holiday destination, and many younger people I know who have travelled there have no idea it has such a tragic, relatively recent history.
It does show the human ability to move on.

Satisfyingly geeky political analysis
Concluding that the previous left / right binary preference has changed to a 2D 2x2 table because nationalism / internationalism is now also an important factor in voting:

http://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/polmap2d.html

The charts show the change and help visualise tendencies wrt age, geography too, see my merged Pic 1.

My merged Pic 2 shows Voting Intention as a 2D map, plus a table of the 4 basic 2D combinations :
Left / internationalist, left / nationalist, right / nationalist, right / internationalist

So, 4 main parties to represent 4 possible combinations.
However, more than one party may fight to represent the combination that they think the most popular:

1. LibDems are left of centrist, but have currently grabbed the left/internationalists
2. So, Labour could either try to push in on them, or go for the left/ nationalist agenda, pushing back at UKIP.
3. That would put UKIP back in the right /nationalist quarter
4. The Tories would need to either overwhelm UKIP to reclaim the right / nationalist quarter, or adopt a softer approach to Brexit to become right / internationalist (unlikely under May)