Westminstenders: And so it begins

[RedToothBrush]

Promises made that can not be kept.

We have already fallen at the first stumbling block: the desire for parallel talks on exit and future relationship that May wanted has been rejected. Not that this is a surprise seeing as we were told this.

This isn't two years of negotiations for a good deal. Forget any suggestions that it is. It's two years of damage limitation and domestic pr.

For both the UK and EU.

I do believe that May's attitude - which seemed to be more friendly in her speech and letter yesterday - has burnt all our bridges.

This talk of the world needing the EU's 'liberal democracy' isn't aimed at the EU though. Her use of the words that produced uproar in the HoC yesterday was deliberate. Why use it? It was always going to produce a reaction.

When May says she will have a consensus at home to achieve this goal one of two things must happen: to prove just how much we need the EU to make a political reversal possible at the expense of her head or to vilify the EU to a point that Remainers suddenly change their mind.

To get a good deal for the UK she can not satisfy her hard line Brexiteers. It is impossible purely because to do otherwise is like breaking the laws of physics. Trade is done mostly with who you are closest too. This is the inescapable truth. We are leaving the EU but not Europe as keeps being pointed out.

If we want to trade we have to accept EU regulations. If we do not, we do not trade. Rules we can now no longer influence by must obey.

We can not reduce immigration. We have had control of non-Eu immigration and that is not going down due to skills shortages. To combat this schools are getting less money.

In terms of sovereignty and British parliament we just gave that away. The 'Great' Repeal Act is a power grab by the executive. It seems to give the powers of the monarch to Mrs May and take them away from parliamentary scrutiny. At the same time we are forced to become beholden to Trump's America. A man who screws people for a living and has not a shred of honour.

Using security as our bargaining chip misses the obvious. If we do not cooperate we endanger Brits abroad and ourselves domestically. Are we really prepared to stop?

The opportunities of Brexit Britain are bleak. This will be normalised.

Good luck folks. We are gonna need it.

Banks, and this 'war':

"Or as Banks puts it: “We were just cleverer than the regulators and the politicians. Of course we were.”

He didn’t break the law, he says. He “pushed the boundary of everything, right to the edge. It was war.” And later: “You’re looking for a smoking gun but there’s a smoking gun on every table! And no one cares. No one cares!” "

www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/apr/02/arron-banks-interview-brexit-ukip-far-right-trump-putin-russia

Like you said RTB, 'no one cares' . It's official.

I’ve started to think that Brexit isn’t our Trump moment. That’s what’s coming next – 2016 will be nothing next to the general election of 2020, our year of reckoning.

Michael Howard is now talking about war with Spain over Gibraltar. Unbelievable.
www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/apr/02/britain-and-eu-worse-off-without-brexit-deal-says-michael-fallon

This is all happening ver, very fast. Who's going to be the grown up to put the brakes on?

Wrong link, sorry. Not working,
Theresa May would go to war to protect Gibraltar, Michael Howard says Former Tory leader suggests PM would act to protect Gibraltar’s sovereignty as Margaret Thatcher did for the Falklands

In The Guardian now

woman Isobel Oakshot (she of the DM) was on the Sunday Politics and they were discussing the straight jacket GO has left PH in. She note that anyone who votes Conservative for a smaller state in a society where the rich pay a higher percentage of the total tax take has to realise that shrinking the state benefits the rich at the expense of the poor.

This is absolutely elementary and yet no-one in Labour makes the point. They just have to play her saying it on repeat if they are too scared of being accused of denying Mandy's trickle down theories.

Gibraltar is clearly one tactic the Tories will use as Weapons of Mass Distraction.
So they can Brexit without their impossible special deal, but on a wave of nationlist fervour against the EU

Judging by the current Gibraltar thread, it's working brilliantly

Spain isn't threatening to invade, just to veto a deal it doesn't like on Gibraltar
It may also deny access to Gibraltar through its airspace, or through its land

Even the Tories wouldn't be crazy enough to provoke a war with Spain ...... maybe boarding its fishing boats and arresting crews ?

howabout Unfortunately, at least the 40% of voters the Tories need - and probably quite a sizeable % that Labour need too - just refuse to pay sufficient taxes to addequately fund the nhs and e welfare state.

We see it even on MN.

The most painless tax would be IHT, which would have the additional beneficial effect of slowing the transfer of wealth from one section of the population to the other.

However, IHT is highly resisted and effectively demonised in the taloids
The better off determined to transfer their wealth down the generations.

Also CGT on profit from any property sale, not just for 2nd homes or BTL
Taxes seem designed to ensure the better off don't pay , it's deliberate

So, it is a race to the bottom,among political parties, to bribe selfish voters with ever more tax cuts, i.e. benefit cuts.

Tories and Labour both only concerned with the greedy, not the needy

Because the needy have no power, make no donations, often don't / can't vote.

Didn't I read that all the savings GO made in austerity have been spent propping up the economy during Brexit already?

Judging by the current Gibraltar thread, it's working brilliantly

Yes, because we have already had an admission that they won't be able to cut immigration significantly and a realisation that threatening non-cooperation over security in return for trade deals is a non starter. Martin Rowson had a good cartoon in Saturday's Guardian on a similar idea.

I would be amused about all these people screaming about Gibraltar being British, who in 95% of cases, as with the Falklands before the Falklands War, haven't the faintest idea where these places are, never mind know anything else about them, if it wasn't so tragic. At a time when we need cool heads, and calm discussion with give and take, what do we get but the worst jingoism?

Still, at least I know now to renew my passport early, to retain my maroon one.

I enjoyed the "island of Gibraltar" post

Gibraltar's just the focus for the ritual 2 minutes of hate. Like the trolls, one can almost set one's clocks by the regular dog whistles.
It would be funny if it wasn't so embarrassing. Britain now has the status of the idiot nation. It's a coup, but being a British one, it's cheap, nasty, and will probably break.

Oh, there's a certain poster in particular who keeps broadly hinting the Uk should threaten to withhold military and intelligence cooperation unless the EU concedes the special trade deal that May wants.

Bad enough siding with Trump, but threatening not to help our neighbours defend against ISIS attacks, or Russian invasion, has to be an all time low

I expect them to keep ramping up Gib, woman
There's no other issue that's such a good focus for raising nationalistic fervour against the "EU bullies" who won't give us what we want

Bigchoc even the squeezed middle eventually start to realise they are more likely to end up in the bottom 10% than the top 10% if you kick enough of them off the housing ladder, compress their living standards, and cut social insurance and public services. The more you raise the pension age the fewer pensioners there are to vote for this and even now fewer of them have wealth left to protect after they have helped their own.

woman GO's austerity savings were spent long ago on the double dip recession he caused in 2012 and all they are doing now is suppressing growth further.

Matthew Parris: Explaining the rage of Leavers at even polite questions & peaceful protests

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/02/insistent-splenetic-almost-crazed-brexiteers-driven-mad-brexit/

"Which is why the insistent, splenetic, neuralgic, angry, obsessive and sometimes almost crazed intensity of so many in the Leave crowd has become a source of concern to the rest of us.

It isn’t as if these people lost the referendum.
It isn’t as if their plans are being thwarted!

They won,
we concede it,
and the government is executing their instructions with resolve
— and all the signs are that the final outcome will be the ‘hard’ Brexit so many of them crave.

So what’s bugging them?

Why do they, the winners, keep lashing out whenever one of the losers doubts or questions their plans?
You can almost see the veins standing out on their necks as they rail against the people who didn’t win the referendum.

I think most of these voters, MPs and journalists are public-spirited patriots who are secretly, usually unconsciously, terrified that they’ve done the wrong thing.

They do of course care.
They urged their country forward into a leap in the dark and now worry desperately lest it turn out badly.

They’re displaying the classic psychopathology of deep anxiety, seeing enemies and conspiracies everywhere,
hitting out angrily at all dissent,
and channelling their own fear into aggression against those who are in fact expressing it"

howabout I hope this change you expect happens before too many sanctioned people die.
I see no real signs of change.

There is a cold pitiless attitude across the upper 70% or so of income / wealth, of "look after our own first"
It originally was used to mean look after British people, but naturally has now morphed into just looking after immediate family and demonising anyone who is not self-supporting as "scroungers"
... until pensionable age, when they suddenly become deserving.

Social Darwinism with the pendulum stuck at the Party of NO.

Explaining the rage of Leavers
In psychology, I think the rage of the regretful and terrified brexiteers is called 'transference'?

Dear Matthew Parris, The political establishment in the form of the EU and the centrist right / left progressive liberal middle ground you represent have a very long history of understanding and listening to the plight of the masses while doing exactly what they want to benefit themselves and their particular pet special interest groups. This is why there is a deep mistrust of anyone who questions the perfectly reasonable, if robust, opening negotiating position of the TM Government.

Yours

A Cynical Leaver fed up of being patronised, insulted and psychoanalysed

Coincidentally and appositely, Facebook told me that I shared this article a year ago

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/31/wealth-creators-klepto-rewards-bosses?CMP=fb_gu

My comment at the time unfortunately still stands and if anything things have got worse

"Good article (although a bit ranty at times, as Monbiot can be). It demonstrates that "trickle down" politics a) is unethical and b) DOESN'T work. The gap in average remuneration was 6x in the 90s and 180x now."

If anyone's feeling righteous anger it should be all the people like Stojan Jankovic. To be deported on Tuesday after 26 years here:
you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/stop-the-shameful-deportation-of-kentish-town-s-stoly-jankovic
www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/apr/02/thousandssign-petition-london-shop-worker-deportation-stojan-jankovic
That old traitor Gary Linneker supporting the campaign.
Please sign.

Re the Gibraltar situation, it was draft guidelines that were leaked - not the finalised version. It will be interesting to see if Spain's veto is kept in the final version.

On the subject of Brexit/EU/Globalisation - from a sociological perspective, Brexit was pretty much inevitable. All the theories developed around the industrialisation of the West are as relevant now as then.

Update on that brutal racist attack on 17-year-old asylum seeker: 6 arrests

6 people in their early 20s have been arrested after a teenage asylum seeker was left fighting for his life in hospital in an attack being treated as a hate crime by police.

"The boy was with two friends late on Friday night at a bus stop in Croydon when he was approached by a group of about eight people, who demanded to know where he was from.
After replying that he was seeking asylum, the gang chased him and launched their attack.

The teenager, a Kurdish Iranian aged 17, was left unconscious on the ground after receiving repeated blows to the head.
Scotland Yard said he suffered a fractured skull and blood clot on the brain and on Sunday was said to be in a serious but stable condition."

Carole Cadwalladr's interview with Arron Banks, posted earlier by woman, is so good, so sickening and so important that I'm just going to post it again in case anyone missed it the first time:

www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/apr/02/arron-banks-interview-brexit-ukip-far-right-trump-putin-russia

Delving into "that defining phenomenon of our age: a grassroots movement funded and built by a multimillionaire".

Just a pedantic correction: the draft guidelines were not "leaked".

They were issued formally by the EU as part of their commitment to transparency unlike our government

In the same way that WM wouldn't reveal when/where the A50 letter was going to be handed over (supposedly for fear of being disrupted) , whereas Tusk's office issues his timetable for the day, including when, where and who would be handing over the A50 letter