Westminstenders: Don't Panic!

[RedToothBrush]

It's official

Brexit is like an episode of Dads Army with the government, being Captain Mainwaring's trusty band of elite forces doing battle against the evil Mr Barnier.

Yesterday Parliament gave back control to the executive as it surrendered parliamentary sovereignty to Janus faced May. Grieve, it has to be said, truly did look like a broken man as he gave his speech in the commons. Not that we should have too much sympathy. After all he did just put party before country.

So where are we now? The ERG are happy. They have successfully bullied enough until everyone else gave up and folded. They now have no incentive to compromise, as they know that no one can stand up to them. They want no deal, and it's no deal they will force.

The EU are thoroughly fed up and it's difficult to see them do anything but cut us loose saying Brexit means Brexit, this is what you wanted. They have stepped up planning for no deal and their plans were already much more advanced than ours.

We go into the next round of talks with a solution to the Irish Border looking further away than ever. Not helped by the fact that brexit nationalism is restricted to England alone, with many being happy to let NI be sunk into the Irish sea and the favour the rebuilding of Hadrian's wall in order to keep out the foreigners.

It's hard to resist simply sitting down wailing "we doomed". But try to resist and keep saying, you are against this crap. If only so history books don't just say we all agreed to this clusterfuck.

Here have a fluffy bunny to help comfort you.

Indeed Woman

Looking forward to it!

Yes, Argentina has slipped so far that people forget it was ever an economic powerhouse. History can be useful if not always encouraging.

Am I the only one that was prompted to learn a bit about Argentina from "Evita" ?

btw, I have a solution for Ni and Brexit:

The UK must become an Overseas Territory of the RoI

Hear me out:

Greenland was able to Exit the EU, like this
Greenland belongs to (federal) Denmark, but not to the EU
Greenland retains some ties with the EU via Denmark.
However, EU law mostly doesn't apply to Greenland except wrt trade (almost all fish)

For Greenland, about the size of a small UK town and with a v v simple economy that is just fishing, it took a couple of years to negotiate
So expect about 10 years for the UK to Brexit fully, without noticeable pain.

My solution has the advantage that NI can choose to stay with the RoI
and Scotland - Wales too, if it wishes - could gain independence (from the RoI ! ) within the EU, or just become part of a Celtic Federation with the RoI, which might also reassure NI.

DG I became curious about Argentina from reading old thrillers & detective stories in my youth, which sometimes had an Argentinian character accompanying the hero, as an alternative / equal to an American,
i.e. Argentina was regarded with great respect, which made me dig into why this was and how it had changed

There's a ... curious ... film with an Argentine theme with an incredibly young looking (DM speaking through me again !) Vincent D'Onofrio ...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_Tango

I caught it on Ch4 back in the 90s ....

The almost-unparalleled increase in prosperity led to Argentina becoming the seventh wealthiest developed nation in the world by the early 20th century

However, too many associations with Nazi war criminals ... famously Eichmann was kidnapped by the Israelis from Argentina ... (Did anyone see the TV drama about the televising of his trial with Martin Freeman ?)

@BigChocFrenzy - your Celtic Federation idea has given me the biggest chuckle in ages. And weirdly only slightly more barmy than some of the other ideas I've seen.

I was taught Spanish by an Argentinian who taught me a lot about their cultural history. I was surprised by how European many of their customs were and she was surprised how similar European customs were compared to US citizens she was used to teaching.

Venezuela is an oil rich country that is practically bankrupt after corruption and economic mismanagement
And populism/ fascism/brexism did for Venezuala
Venezuala was the 4th richest country in the world in the 1950s.
Thanks BCF learnt a lot on this thread.

Looking at previous empires
And that representative democracies with equal rights for women and minorities are an anomalous and precious burp in the norm of totalitiarianism.
Minoans were doing what we were with human rights and plumbing 5000 yrs ago.

The music of the Celtic Federation will blow the socks off that of wangland, (and everything else)

I’m afraid I have no faith in the government or the PM having a secret plan to claw back some sanity. It reminds me of the lead up to the Iraq war when we all convinced ourselves that Blair had to know something we didn’t know, something he wasn’t willing or able to share. We thought there had to be some other explanation for his actions. But there was nothing else, just a stubborn determination to go to war - despite the evidence.

Greenland is why I knew that it would never be possible to negotiate everything required within the 2 years of invoking A50 - unless a lot of preparatory work had been done which it wasn't

Greenland with only one industry - fishing - and a tiny population of c50,000 and no land border with the EU still took 18 months to sort out its exit from the EEC (not even the Single Market)

@plonky
Not sure why you addressed to me but it is great to see someone (other than the few regulars) putting thought into this mess, rather than 'we won'.
Britain had quite an influence in Argentina many years ago, I wonder if that helped their decline?
@woman. Ms Sturgon says she doesn't want to play with Westminster and Brexit any more so you never know.
Arg and Ven fell prey to massive corruption. Not surprising in some ways as you could drop the UK into the middle of either and not find it again afterwards.

Oh, don't for one second think I believe TM has a grand plan. Let's face it, most of the "successful" (define that as you will) world leaders in history could be described as opportunists flying by the seat of their pants.

The original Roman empire, before eastern expansion (if you can call it that. It was more strategic than straightforward expansion) lasted a couple of hundred years really. Closer to the time frame of the British empire than the Egyptian one, or the Chinese. Not sure you can generalise down enough to say that empires are measured in decades any more. The classicist in me won't allow it.

Oh and as others have suggested - the parallels between Argentina & Venezuela, and the current UK, are striking. All formerly successful, prosperous nations. Then corruption and bad governance play out.

54321 cider has been had so I'm not sure either, but I think I was putting my reasoning forward in answer to a question you posed previously. Ill go back to lurking and fretting soon enough

British railway engineers 'built' the railways in Argentina. By which I mean British engineers told the locals where to dig I expect. Also selling them engines I presume.
An 'off the wall' idea was mooted in the times of the NI troubles to change all British (or at least English), to Irish. A strange form of 'I am Spartacus' type thing.
@BigChoc. Would HMQ mind being Irish do you think?

It may be naive of me, but I feel somewhat hopeful today. I was seriously, seriously depressed about all this last week. I wasn’t sleeping, and was constantly flipping between deep despair, anger and panic.

The march was amazing, I followed it on twitter all day and wished I was there. And the rumoured counter-protests, violence and possible riots never happened - it’s like the Brexiteers have given up. Daniel Hannan backed out of a debate with Femi Oluwole from Our Future Our Choice on C4 news this evening.

However, I really think the ball is in Corbyn’s court now. Even if Theresa May is keen on a soft Brexit, her hands are tied by the ERG, and they are emboldened by the lack of opposition from Labour.

Labour has a clear mandate to come out in opposition to any kind of Brexit now. The polling numbers (UK-wide and of Labour members and voters) show that the people’s view is now firmly anti-Brexit. Boris Johnson has shown the government’s hand - we know they’re after the catastrophic No Deal.

Labour pledged a no-jobs-lost Brexit. It’s time for them to admit that that is impossible, and press the government to ditch the whole stupid idea.

Does Corbyn have the courage to do it? Who will blink first?

Christ, this is all too much.

@Plonky, sadly even your cider infused brain is WAY beyond so many others.
I still don't see who the UK's next 'best buddy' is going to be.
Wandering off the piste and looking at things that DGR, Bigchoc etc put links to is quite depressing. The War in the desert piece on the BBC website is particularly disturbing and has interesting facets like the amount of money the USA is putting into that direction (self interest of course). Leave as a simple 'piss off the EU' project is fine as it goes (stupid) but to leave tight security and a 'best buddy' with the possibilities of trouble from the South is really worrying if we are isolated.

I don't think May has a plan, but she has a strategy (of sorts): keep the plates spinning for another day, another week, another month, and if a day of reckoning appears to be coming then find a way to kick the can a little further down the road.

That's why I think we'll ultimately have BINO. The longer we go without preparation and planning for a hard Brexit the more unrealistic that option becomes. A fudged version of BINO will end being the only path available.

I’m afraid I have no faith in the government or the PM having a secret plan to claw back some sanity. It reminds me of the lead up to the Iraq war when we all convinced ourselves that Blair had to know something we didn’t know, something he wasn’t willing or able to share. We thought there had to be some other explanation for his actions. But there was nothing else, just a stubborn determination to go to war - despite the evidence.

I never at one poiint ever felt that.I always knew Blair was a fuck nugget at that point.

I was saying earlier that had the vote gone just remain rather than just leave, things could have been so different. OK the leavers would whinge but the loss of business confidence and fall in the pound would not have happened. If leave had agitated more we could have looked harder at A50 and said OK possible but we need to sort out NI and it will cost a load of money and may lose jobs, do we want it.
But we are where we are.

Why neither left nor right really want a "People's / Jobs Brexit":

Corbyn & McDonnell are "disaster socialists"
just like the Ultras are "disaster fascists" - joining with the alt-right
and Brexit oligarchs are "disaster capitalists"

The hard left and the hard right both see Brexit as an opportunity to remake the country as they wish
to collapse the economy, create chaos and a desperate public who will accept very strong measures that would normally be unthinkable.

Both political extremes also flirt with Putin, a nationalist fascist, who wants to destabilise the whole of Europe economically & politically

The disaster capitalists - who seem to have found it very cheap to buy a hell of a lot of political influence -
plan to make a killing from the chaos, both by "shorting" the pound / the share price of Uk businesses
and by snapping up bargains in devalued businesses or property.

They are loosely allied with the alt-right across Europe and the USA, as well as Putin,
all in the name of kleptocracy

Too many vested interests in bringing down the UK from a rich 1st world county into a basket case

Really Red? I wasnt a massive fan, but thought his judgement was so phenomenally off re Iran that something else must have been going on.

Even after the referendum, Brexit would have been totally different if Clinton, or a standard Republican, even Mike Pearce, had become POTUS.

In the normal course of events, the US pushes to keep Europe & Britain stable and together.
Any normal POTUs would have insisted on at most a soft Brexit, possibly even demanded after such a close result that the UK govt do impact analyses for 2 years and then explain why Brexit would be too damaging

Instead, Trump seems to want to destroy every rival to the USA
whether it be the EU, UK, China, South Korea …

He loves dictators and mass murderers , e.g. Putin and cannot deal with democratic leaders who follow international law.
He rejects laws he didn't write and wants to impose US wishes by force.

Absolutely agree BigChoc, but Labour can absolutely not pretend that it’s their members’, or the general public’s, will any more.

If they want to be electable, they have to oppose Brexit now - or, at the very least, push for BINO and a second referendum (as pointless as both those things would be).

I don’t hold out much hope that they will change course, in which case it’s over the cliff edge we go.