Westministenders: Boris and God Knows what next. (I'm all out of ideas!)

[RedToothBrush]

Still a week until Stoke and Copeland. (Labour Hold/Con Gain unless something strange happens) QT is from Stoke next week.

A50 hits the Lords next week. Melania is being lined up to do something for the women. (God help us all).

Will UKIP survive? Will Nuttall survive? Will Labour survive? Will Trump survive? Will CNN survive? Will the Lords survive? Will Theresa May survive a class room of children?

All these questions and more

www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/ap/article-4234406/AP-Interview-Sweden-PM-Brexit-deal-2-years-tough.html

From the DM of all places.
So, if even moderate and calm Sweden says it's more or less impossible to stick to the timetable of two years and it will be very hard to get an agreement.
And that, btw, we WILL be paying a lot of money to the EU.

TM being at the Lords makes me think.
What is her point?
Is she so worried that they will modify it too much?
Does she want to put some pressure on them to 'behave' (and check what exactely they are saying behind her back)?

Small comfort, but the Brexit debate in the Lords seems to be a bit meatier than the equivalent in the Commons. Lots of well-deserved criticism aimed at the government and May herself. They've also pointed out that threatening to flood the Lords with hundreds of new Tory peers if the current incumbents are not seen to comply would take a couple of years so it's a bit of a hollow threat.

Mugs?

"When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die"

Ok, that's from Game of Thrones by G R R Martin obv 😀

But....I dunno....seems a bit too close for comfort lately.

TM won't get the deal she thinks she should get and that will mean that a lot of uk businesses will die....and not just the big car plants and financial sector jobs.

I feel desperately pessimistic about it all tbh...

Mugs!?
How very VERY appropriate.
All leavers should have one....

RedandYellow: I hope May was there, smiling her rather mirthless smile, when Lord Newby came out with this:
The white paper is "a rather horrifying mixture of pious aspiration and complacent delusion. The prime minister’s preface sets the tone. British exceptionalism abounds."

Or when Angela Smith said: the "lack of government planning has created a vacuum in which uncertainty has thrived. “Brexit means Brexit” was perhaps the most unwise of all statements following the referendum. It just served to highlight that void."

Reuters World ‏*@ReutersWorld*
JUST IN: French police searching National Front headquarters in relation to Le Pen's fake EU parliament assistant job - official

The wake up call will be hard IMO for a lot of people who think the EU will bow to their requests. It will also be very hard to wake up with WTO only and no FTA. Few countries will be happy to go against the EU and their FTA to please the uk.

Red and Yellow can you confirm where it says we will have WTO to fall back on? Cos everyone keeps making this assumption, yet we have still yet to even confirm this and there is no guarantee we will even have that.

Its bonkers the framing of the debate is "We want X but Y is our fall back position, but we'll neglect to tell everyone we are yet to confirm we have Y to fall back on, and in reality we might end up with Z aka utterly screwed beyond what we say the worse case scenario is"

What should we stock up on in early 2019? We are all preppers now.

I always think of the quotation about the small folk wanting to get on with their lives while the high lords play their game of thrones and then lots of them get dragged into it and die.

This is not a direct quotation, by the way.

It looks like far right MEPs just can't help themselves: Marine Le Pen's offices are being raided by the police after allegations of misuse of EU funds. I hope she has a more convincing defense than Nigel and Nuttalls.

I'm beginning to wonder if Brexit has been an EU plan all along, and Brexiteers have been conned into thinking it's for their benefit.

Vive l'irony !

Shitebag Jacob Rees Mogg has just alluded to 'Pimping the Sovereign" in the Trump debate.
Sounds like a Sex Pistols record

We have that quotation in Malaysia Cecile - funny how it is a timeless and borderless sentiment!

"Gajah berjuang sama gajah, kancil mati di tengah-tengah"

When elephants battle each other, the mousedeer is killed in the midst.

Nigel Evans to add to yesterday's list.

www.cer.org.uk/publications/archive/policy-brief/2017/mrs-mays-emerging-deal-brexit-not-just-hard-also-difficult
Mrs May's emerging deal on Brexit: Not just hard, but also difficult

An article about our poker hand, which somehow everyone can work out...

I suspect that when A50 was being drafted, especially with its 2-year timing, noone had imagined that an exiting country would demand a special deal ....

(although they should have realised the most likely country to exit and that it always wants special)

The A50 architects probably assumed only 3 possibilities:

1. Fully in the EU
2. Fully in EEA / EFTA - also possible as a transition period to a customised deal
3. Fully out - but hadn't realised what this meant for the leaving country

The UK govt may be attempting - and Leave voters seem to be assuming - to create a 4th alternative within the 2 years
However, there isn't the time to do this, because the time is really 18 months, because of the requirement for E27 and EU Parliament approval.

imo, the terms of a transition period need to be pretty much off the shelf 2). This then gives 5 years or whatever to negotiate a special deal

Aternative 3), if FOM is a red line even for the transition period, means a serious hit for the economy for however many years it takes to negotiate trade deals with all the other trade blocs with whom we want to trade.

I thought it was drafted specifically to satisfy the UK?

Red I've posted before about the horrendously complex task of defining UK quotas within WTO, for all the huge categories & subcategories of goods.
Then any country can object to any one of them.
iirc, Misti has posted additional requirements before the UK is able to trade under WTO rules

A disorderly Brexit could leave UK trade relations like those of North Korea

I think A50 was drafted with the UK in mind, cecile but they assumed any leaving country would be realistic - and have a PLAN

Yes iirc Lord Kerr, who drafted A50 said he never thought it would be used, and it was only put in to pacify UK eurosceptics.

...the irony being, of course, that for leavers, when it all goes tits up it will STILL be the fault of the EU
Not the MPs who lied to them, the right wing media who exploited them or Nigel farage who has spent decades trying to exit the EU and in all that time, has never actually made a plan for that exit....
Nope
It's still the nasty EU as the cause of all our troubles...
Sigh.

Incidentally Lord Kerr feels the chance of an orderly Brexit within 2 years is less than 50%.

EU and Remoaners.

I think it's fairly clear by now it's not going to be orderly?

To anyone with half a brain.

Quite, ninon.
Project fear?
Or "project just reporting what's actually happening"
We are seeing the same thing in the US and it scares me....if you don't agree with something your govt does you are a "traitor"

TBH I think there must be a sizeable number of MEPs and euro leaders who just want us the fuck out now...