Westminstenders: Exit 2020 Vision

[RedToothBrush]

Yet it is a great mistake to suppose that the only writers who matter are those whom the educated in their saner moments can take seriously. There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and the superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, capturers and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people, who thereupon take leave of sanity and responsibility. And it occasionally happens that this underworld becomes a political power and changes the course of history.
Norm Cohn ‘Warrant for Genocide’ 1970

(As referenced by Nick Cohen).

We have a deal (or bits of a deal). Bino til Dec 2020. Then the cliff?

Still a long way to go. It sounds better than it could be. But worse than it initially seems.

Yorkshire Evening Post . Ican
www.yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk/news/great-northern-march-organisers-hail-incredible-turnout-in-leeds-and-say-there-s-a-lot-to-play-for-1-9080880
Drumming
www.newsflare.com/video/192408/politics-business/great-northern-march-band-warming-up-the-crowds-in-leeds
Arthur's Seat ( and pro EU crowds) looked more beautiful than ever in pictures from Edinburgh.
not those to do with the uk Yep pain

@TheElementsSong

Did you get any counter demonstrations at your march? They was a small one at mine, about 12 - 15 people. They were so angry and aggressive! I'm guessing maybe they were Briton First or NF/BNP something like that?

descrier.co.uk/politics/anti-brexit-rallies-held-across-uk/
Grass-roots organised regional rallies were held in Exeter, Ipswich, Isle of White, Lincoln, Maidenhead, Newcastle, Oxford, Pontypridd, Sussex, with smaller protests also being held elsewhere.

pretzels We loved the drumming, the DC were kind of boogieing to the beat!

@KenDodd I didn't see any counter demonstrations, but we weren't there for the whole thing only for the first part. In general passersby appeared either positive (interested) or neutral (perplexed) .

I don't think anyone has posted this and some of you might want to sign it
petition.parliament.uk/petitions/205332

Signed, although I expect the usual 'F off' type of answer with a we are leaving, the country voted democratically, blah, blah.

Brexit insider claims Vote Leave team may have breached spending limits

Whistleblower alleges that electoral spending rules could have been manipulated over controversial donation and that Vote Leave ‘tried to delete key evidence’

amp.theguardian.com/politics/2018/mar/24/brexit-whistleblower-cambridge-analytica-beleave-vote-leave-shahmir-sanni

Oh well, lost cause then Mays useless, Corbyns useless, the lib dems useless. We will have to elect our own leader and start our own party. Anyone up for it?

Thanks, Quentin, signed.

Not as many at Ipswich march as I thought there would be.

The new Guardian report is fascinating, especially the whisteblower video linked to by @pain above. It’s what we suspected, but to hear someone tell the story is really something else...

That isnt a new story in the sense, it had already previously been said. Its just you've now got someone saying it.

Cummings and Banks have both previously said that the remain campaign did the same plus the government used public funds for some leaflets which were not included in the funding.

The Electoral Commission already looked into BeLeave too, though we now have the electoral commission admitting they made an error in the advice they gave to Vote Leave.

So im not sure how much of this is terribly useful.

Also, why do whistleblowers hide behind walls in the guardian. They just end up looking a bit creepy!

www.channel4.com/news/brexit-campaign-was-totally-illegal-claims-whistleblower

On the bbc!

Liz Rawlings
@lizrawlings
You won't want to miss Sunday Politics tomorrow - we reveal brand new information about SCL Elections, their work overseas and their claims of close links to the British Government. 11am BBC One with @BBCsarahsmith #bbcsp

I have to say I do not relish the prospect of another referendum. Not now, not under these circumstances. This talk of the last one being cheating at does not help. Even if the whistleblower is a leaver. It won't be believed.

Do you think our fragile democracy could withstand another referendum.

I'm minded to remind people that it was four referendum in quick succession which did for Germany.

Even in a choice between ' Hard Brexit' and a deal which is in effect 'BINO' there is inherent danger. It WILL be framed as the liberal elite trying to thwart the will of the people. How you see it, will not be how others see it. And even if you did win, and there is only a very small number of hard core hard line brexiteers who are willing to 'take action' you risk turning them into militants and terrorists.

The serious questions over whether methods which were illegal will not be resolved, nor will any changes needed to add teeth to the Electoral Commission by the time of an another ref. Do you really think any politician will be on their 'best behaviour' for another one? Do you really think Farage won't be in your face, with Bannon and Banks by his side? Do you really think Rees-Moog won't be charming everyone with his delightful manners whilst he lies through his teeth? Do you really think Corbyn won't mobilise the very worst parts of Momentum?

Its a dangerous game to play.

I do rather fell the safest option, would be leave but for transition to be hard. Really hard. And at the end of that for us to get a fast track a49 process with the EU. Whilst we will have pissed them off, I also think that they would welcome us back (without needing to take the euro) as a special case. If only because it would make the EU stronger in the long run, by demonstrating that leading doesn't work.

Its not what I would like or prefer, but I do think that our democracy is in a really back way. It might require a party to win an election with a manifesto which explicitly states we will return to the EU before any reversal can occur. This 'ends the mandate' of the referendum. And that opens to door then to another referendum on safer ground.

I am concerned about where this is now heading. I'm not sure I view it with so much optimism as some of you.

This, btw, is the original story about BeLeave from August 2016.

www.buzzfeed.com/marieleconte/vote-leave-donations?utm_term=.smQXejgGkW#.hdbRaN8oQ2
Why Did Vote Leave Donate £625,000 To A 23-Year-Old Fashion Student During The Referendum?
The winning pro-Brexit group made the unusual decision to hand an enormous sum of money to a hitherto unknown political campaigner in the final days of the EU referendum campaign, limiting scrutiny until after the result.

Pete North

1. This thread goes out to remainers and the #FBPE bunch. No doubt you will have been told "you lost, get over it". Well you did lose but I don't expect you to get over it. I do however expect you to give some thought as to what comes next...
2. For all the ultra remain activity, what of it can you say has been productive and successful? Ms Miller's court case backfired on you because we now have a parliamentary vote behind Article 50. Your legal efforts to keep us in the single market will also fail.
3. But let's park that. The fact is that Remain was not able to communicate a case for staying in the EU. The underlying case for remain was that without the inhibitor of the EU, the Tories would be able to do as they please. That was almost a convincing argument.
4. But ultimately that argument is an argument for maintaining the centrist political stalemate preventing any political resolution while things fester under the surface. Kicking the can down the road. You lost that battle.
5. I was opposed to you in that battle. I wanted to drag all this politics out into the open and I wanted to expose the Westminster bubble as the shambolic indolent mess that it is. The question is now what do we do about it?
6. This is where you and I have more in common than I have in common with the Brexit mob who for reasons that escape me have tuned it into a binary issue and have fallen in behind the disaster capitalists of the Tory right. This is not where we want to be as a country.
7. The Brexit prospective of the Tory clan who successfully hijacked Brexit is not one that could win a parliamentary majority - for the simple reason that it is build on a foundation of intellectual sand and is obsolete by at least thirty years.
8. If by now you have mastered the concept of gravity models, non-tariff barriers, trade facilitation and rules of origin then you know that the "free trade" dogma of London libertarian think tanks is little more than delusional waffle.
9. And far from overthrowing the establishment, all Brexit has done is to hand the keys to the establishment to a handful of inbred Tory mouthfoamers whose only knowledge of trade comes from reading the executive summaries of Adam Smith Institute PDFs.

10. Being that there is a total ideas vacuum and you guys are too busy fighting to put the genie back in the bottle, the government falls back on its only intellectual resource. The snake oil salesmen of the IEA and their respective sock puppets. 11. Ultimately the best way to defeat bad ideas is to produce better ones. So it's time for the #FBPE bunch to start asking what happens if we really are leaving the EU? What is your political contribution in that eventuality? 12. In this I am reminded of that Terminator 2 scene - The future's not set, there's no fate but what we make for ourselves". We leavers have gifted the UK a window for change and it is not preordained that we must follow the ambitions and ideals of the Tory right. 13. So the question for all of us is if we don't want their disastrous agenda, and we can safely assume most of us don't want what Corbyn has in mind, how do we fill that ideas vacuum? I wouldn't wait on others to fill it. 14. I'm not asking you to like Brexit. Hell, I don't much like this predicament much either, but I did vote for change and I don't see why any of us should concede the field to self-interested Tories. The old battle has past. A new one begins. 15. What we are watching is a slow burn attempted coup by the right who have been waiting in the wings for decades to bring about a firesale of UK assets in pursuit of an unworkable libertarian wet dream. The refusal to face Brexit reality is the reason they might well succeed. 16. you may still think Brexit can be reversed, but I think we have crossed the event horizon. There is no sign that we will remain and even if we did, you'd just be delaying the inevitable. Britain's exit from the EU, one way or another, was always an inevitability. 17. For the first time in my life I feel like the political script is not already written and Brexit has opened a new chapter in British politics. EU membership was only a blip and many of our long standing problems simply went into hibernation. 18. Now that we are laving we can all agree that London more than Brussels is the cause of our political dysfunction - its culture, politics and media - its insularity and pomposity. The Brexit vote was the regions vs London. So now it's time to fix this and take back control. 19. Those rights you say we needed the EU for, we still have them and for the most part still do. Whether we keep them depends on people re-engaging in politics and making their demands and ideas known. That will not happen if you fixate on fighting yesterday's battle. 20. There will never be another opportunity like this to reshape the UK and to reformulate its external relations and what happens in the next two years will decide which way this goes for all of us for the next half century. 21. The more energy you spend re-fighting the referendum, the more you fight to restore the politics of yesteryear, the more you isolate yourselves and the less influence you will have in the new order. So how about getting with the programme and face facts. Brexit is happening.

More than a bit of truth in that...

I certainly don't want another referendum any time soon - but I would greatly appreciate parliament doing their job and making the hard decisions for us. If it is proved that not only did the leave campaign over spend, but that they were aided by CA and Russia, and that they told outright lies - Parliament should declare the referendum result null and void. And then there should be an extremely lengthy inquiry, spun out for years. Possibly beyond the next election. And then - if there is still appetite - another referendum but with the rules nailed down tight. After all, if they had done this one properly we wouldn't be in this disaster.
Certainly, one of the rules should be that if any one country in the UK votes to remain then we all remain - otherwise it's just a referendum on what England wants - the relative populations make that unavoidable. Plus a requirement of a clear 60:40 split before change is enacted.

I guess we might get a few brexit terrorists but ultimately all they would do is make people dislike and fear brexiteers. And I don't think we would get many.
I think a halt to proceedings based on the illegality of the leave campaign, along with the promise of a (distant) future referendum following an inquiry and some high profile legal proceedings against anyone who broke the laws, would be the best and the easiest outcome. I think this entirely possible - but it does require parliament to grow a backbone and do what they're elected to do. That will be the hardest part - and that is why the marching and emailing etc is so important.

I agree with your post of 20:34 Red, especially your penultimate paragraph.

I do think that so much effort has gone into fighting Brexit, none has gone on anything else solid. The right of Labour haven't really got an alternative vision. Ditto the LDs. The only one I can recall trying to trying to do something is Nick Boles. He has intrigued me, though I don't necessarily agree.

I do think thats in part why the far left has got a foothold.

And I think more thought needs to be given to this question.

I disagree with that Pete North thread. It's just more 'remainers shut up, get behind it and tell us what to do next.'

No

I am not coming up with a plan for what we should do now we are leaving. i am not interested in helping to mitigate the worst of Brexit. Or to find solutions to help us solve problems that arise because Brexit is technically impossible. Because if I do that then I am at least partially agreeing to allow this to happen. NOT IN MY NAME.

Remainers know what we want. We want to remain. Failing that we want to rejoin asap. We know what the solution to our problem is. It's to remain. And it is our right to fight for that until our last breath. If leavers aren't happy with the brexit they are getting then it is their job to come up with alternative ideas. Not ours. There is no form of brexit that will keep the remainers happy. So we should not be expected to help out in the destruction of our rights, essentially green lighting the government to rip them away from us.

Pete North is simply trying to convince us into giving up our fight and putting our efforts into convincing the govt to go with his flexit plan so that he gets what he wants. Pete North can fuck right off.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-43527517

Brexit broadcasting corporation strikes again! Despite the fact that there were about 5000 people on the march in Leeds today, according to the Yorkshire evening post, the BBC have headed their article with hundreds of people march in Leeds. Technically accurate - but there were 50 hundred people there! or, you know, thousands as we would usually use for short hand of a group of over 1000.
The picture they printed is clearly from the very beginning when people were first starting to arrive so the place is half empty. Completely downplaying the scale of the event and making it seem like a half arsed and underwhelming affair. It is pernicious and it is deliberate and it is complete misleading bullshit. I really hope that when the inquiry finally takes place (even if that is in the 2030s) the BBC are held to account and dismantled. Fuck Doctor Who - the bastards need to go, they are no longer fit for purpose.

Pete North is simply trying to convince us into giving up our fight and putting our efforts into convincing the govt to go with his flexit plan so that he gets what he wants.

Completely agree.

Pretzels, I didn't read north like that at all. I read north as saying, think about why voters voted to leave. Much of that was for domestic reasons, which include lack of transparency and poor accountability at local level. It includes a proper discussion over wealth being tied up in older generations in land and house value. It includes this Westminster bubble idea. Its stuff like an alternative to the dementia tax.

And whilst I also agree with your point, I also think that means we fail to provide an alternative to the hard left and right in other areas because there is so much energy spent on stopping brexit.

It means you aren't setting an agenda on other issues.

Brexit does remain my biggest issue. The Withdrawal Bill bothers me deeply. But at the same time, if it becomes all consuming there is nothing to persuade leavers that your vision is better either.

I do find it interesting that there is a small group within the liberal remain part of the Tory party who ARE trying to do exactly that. I think its three or four of them.

Where are the Labour centrists doing similar? The problem with corbyns rule by mob, it means this is impossible.

And meanwhile the LDs have made themselves a single issue party unwittingly, in part because their focus on that alone, means the little publicity they do get is all on that.