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.

I really recommend you take some time to watch one of the select committee proceedings in a soundproofed room so the neighbours don't hear you shouting at the screen. Gove, Lilley, Whittingdale and all the other interchangeable puffed up males of a certain age are in the grip of some sort of positivity cult, as one of the other members commented he must have read my post here -- they do not want to hear facts, or feedback from people who actually know what they are talking about.

We went to see David Tennant in Don Juan in Soho. I could not work out why so many critics were giving a future candidate for national treasure and bit of a crush two stars whilst some were giving him and the play five. Then I twigged, he gives a monologue near the end which the writer has updated for these Brexit times, about hypocracy "At one point, in a topical gag that elicits cheers, he claims: “I’m not a rapist – I don’t grab pussy.” He also has a key soliloquy in which he rails at everything from billionaire tax dodgers to racists posing as patriots and condemns the vanity of an age in which the urge for self-expression has dwindled into: “Hello, welcome to my vlog. Today I bought a plum.” The irony is that DJ is, in many ways, the biggest narcissist of all." (The Observer ) In the Daily Fail that translates as "After two hours of this raunchy braggart satisfying his lusts, the play comes to no powerful conclusion. Don Juan makes a trenchant speech attacking celebritydom – particularly celebrities who blow off about politics, just as Mr Tennant often does.
Yet is the whole spectacle here not built on just that sort of behaviour?
This is a play trying to have it both ways, exposing decadence while simultaneously charging big money for that very sort of titillation. It may be exotic and handsome but ultimately it is as hooked on shallowness as Don Juan" It's the Gary Linekar /Brexit positivity syndrome again......

Messed up the crossing out....

Walking out of the Brexit parliamentary committee is chilling. It means: we have the power, we do not listen.

So interesting on the Don Juan, ron! Lovely David Tennant. I went to see Charles Dance in Coriolanus at the height of the Poll Tax times. It was a great and well reviewed production, portraying a psychologically flawed fascist with mother issues up against a well organised popular plebeian revolt. Different times.

More chillingly, it's modelling the behaviour that they want the government to adopt at the negotiations.

On the cult of positivity now infecting Brexit I first encountered Barbara Ehrenreichs views on the cult of positivity when we shared with many others the tyranny of positivity that is imposed on you with a Cancer diagnosis. She went on from that experience to look at how that same cult of positivity affects American society and especially blinds it to the realities of deprivation and need. "“We’ve been weeding out anybody capable of rational thinking, of realism,” said Ms. Ehrenreich, a longtime activist in leftist politics. “That was, for me, ‘Wow!’ ”" "To Ms. Ehrenreich, the reliance on one’s personal disposition shifts attention from the larger social, political and economic forces behind poverty, unemployment and poor health care. “It can’t all be fixed by assertiveness training,” she said wryly."

www.nytimes.com/2009/10/10/books/10ehrenreich.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Trouble is lala they can behave like authoritarians with their own country people, and not with the EU.

On positive thinking, the nazis did that one.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Themes_in_Nazi_propaganda
"A 1937 essay aimed at propagandists "Heart or Reason? What We don't Want from Our Speakers", explicitly complained that speakers should aim for the heart, not the understanding, and many of them failed to try this. This included an unrelentingly optimistic view. Pure reason was attacked as a colorless thing, cut off from blood. "

May's Easter eggs are more dog whistles.

The positive thinking walk out is hilarious, a report written by brexit supporters, for brexit supporters yet its still not good enough.

Yet its patronising to suggest that the sunlit uplands of unicorns and rainbows is what they have been promising is somewhat unobtainable?

ron, woman I'm glad I'm not the only curmudgeon
I'm v happy most of the time, but when shit happens to someone we should acknowledge their pain and allow them to express it.
Relentless cheerfulness and positivity can be denying the grim reality the other person is telling you.

You don't help a problem by talking over the victim

I notice on MN threads the stream of suggestions that might be good advice for someone younger / fitter / more educated / less depressed / not heavily encumbered by caring responsiblities.
For the actual OP, they are hopelessly beyond reach.
Then comes the "well, you're not even trying to help yourself"

If those Brexiters refuse to acknowledge the problems, then they don't have to consider the unpalatable solutions.

I'm unsure if the Tories will be punished if there is a disastrous Brexit.
There will be denial, distraction by patriotic indignation

If all else fails, blame it on TM and then move on with say the Teflon-covered Bojo - he is determined to be PM when he grows up.

This included an unrelentingly optimistic view. Pure reason was attacked as a colorless thing, cut off from blood. "
But ultimately, that did not save the Nazis and their sympathisers. I wonder how many sympathisers actually admitted to being duped? I suspect not as many as should have done; I imagine they just went quiet. In the same way the Brexitters are now beginning to go quiet.

If those Brexiters refuse to acknowledge the problems, then they don't have to consider the unpalatable solutions.

It's like a cancer though - ignoring it doesn't usually make it go away, it usually gets worse. The sooner you acknowledge it, the sooner you can get treatment.

If those Brexiters refuse to acknowledge the problems, then they don't have to consider the unpalatable solutions.
It comes back to 'its only impossible if you stop and think about it'

Fox hunts rough trade;
www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/04/liam-fox-meets-philippine-president-rodrigo-duterte
^Liam Fox meets Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte
UK minister in talks with leader who called Barack Obama a ‘son of a whore’ and whose war on drugs has left thousands dead^

It is getting thoroughly depressing. TM in Saudi, Fox meeting Duterte. Can this really be what they want? Deals with the nastiest, all in the name of freedom? Surely there must be some more tories who cannot stomach the way this is going?

Is it because the civilised world doesn't want anything to do with the country we have become?

Dutere, iirc has also publicly confessed to multiple murders with his own bare hands.

We're so classy these days

You forgot the trips to see Trump and Erdogan

interesting that Autocorrect tried to predict trident for trips!

Then we had May enthusing about NATO, with one of her dummies now threatening a war against another NATO member!

Ah to be fair we've never had any issue siding up to despotic regimes. It's how we are still amongst tge top 5 arms dealers in the world

I actually agree with the Corbyn on this. It's morally and ethically wrong. I actually agree with a lot of his views. Just not him

I guess many of the civilised counties have a deal already with the EU? We're now reduced to the bottom feeders. But they seem so bloody happy and eager about it! It is nauseating that TM is again in Saudi and again not raising any issues. The Cadbury story seems to take way to much column space, considering everything that's going on.

www.ft.com/content/88cfc674-1613-11e7-b0c1-37e417ee6c76

FT article on how to get Britain back into the EU which ends:

" Listen to people like the young man at one of those recent anti-Brexit demonstrations in London who talked about the EU in rather different terms than the pro-Remain campaigners did last year. He said he was born a citizen of the EU, and that Brexit would take away part of his identity. That is what I would have said too. Think of free movement of labour not as a bug, but as a feature. Don’t defend it — make it your campaign theme.

People may scoff at what they might think of as identity nonsense. The pro-EU campaign did not want to touch the subject with a barge pole, preferring its doomed message on the economy. There has never been a better time to challenge conventional wisdom than after such a disaster.

I am not certain whether a campaign to coax Britain back into the EU could succeed. But if it were to, then these factors would be the reason, not because the British economy is doing worse outside the single market, or because a large bank relocates some back-office staff to Frankfurt."

I agree unicorn.
It actually wouldn't be suitable for the Uk to join the eu again now, not with the attitude that prevails atm and only bvaiwenknow that won the euthe uk doomed enomically.
It needs to actually buy into the eu values.

What I am. Wondering is if it will ever do that.

Maybe 'a new and deeper partnership' will more easily be formed, not with the EU, but with more globally (and rich) renowned bastions of enemies of human rights.

www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/apr/04/uks-need-for-post-brexit-trade-deals-will-trump-human-rights-concerns

and in an older publication,

"British military advisers are in control rooms assisting the Saudi-led coalition staging bombing raids across Yemen that have killed thousands of civilians, the Saudi foreign minister and the Ministry of Defence have confirmed."

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/saudiarabia/12102089/UK-military-working-alongside-Saudi-bomb-targeters-in-Yemen-war.html

What struck me about that article was the military personnel were in the control room. With others, far away from where many civilians, even hospital patients, lost their lives at touches of buttons. But that is the way it is now. Civilians are so easily targeted and killed, without any comeback. Well, it seems murdered in this instance.

If the government persists in this mercenary style involvement, it may be that the strange, quasi-religious language used in stating that military, per se, are (as an implied objective truth) carrying out a personal sacrifice may not always automatically be accepted as the reality. Even by a receptive home audience who regard them as sacred cows.

A lot of these visits May has been on, have obviously to do with weapons. And they said the UK didn't manufacture anything any more! From what happened in Saudi, I wonder if part of the deal is now that British personnel can be provided to assist with the use of the weapons to carry out the murders missions.

I just had an email about this petition in my inbox.

It's about scrapping the immigration target, which is so detrimental to the country's economy, and which is worse, to the perception of it as a welcoming, outward-looking, cosmopolitan country.

Maybe the rich and/or connected who were on the leave campaign have a vision of how they want the UK to be. Some of the 40+ years agitation may even have been sponsored by those with that vision.

When DD said it will not be as terrible as some people say, he might have been thinking of something along a global offence defence industry.