Westministers: Operation Over The Cliff

[RedToothBrush]

Bit late and didn't realise the last thread was so close to the end... so this is a very quick OP

What do you think the secret continency plan name the government have in place for the No Deal?

Suggestions Please

To get out of the mess that the UK is in will require a lot of clear thinking and serious investments. With the current showing of leadership and 'wibbling' about £350M a week I have reservations.

It could also come down to a panicked headless chicken phone call at ten to eleven on the 29th March. Our retreat does not have to be orderly.

Taiwan is only a part of China in the eyes of the Chinese. It's an independent country.

they really did rebuild new lives.

But it took them a good many years, and if Eric Lomax's story is typical, also helped to blight the lives of their families. His mother died prematurely believing him dead and his marriage broke down. How many more stories were there like that?

How long will it take to repair the splits that Brexit has caused? Ten years, 25?

Some actions could potentially be good- like making an effort to train our own NHS staff, instead of always relying on foreign staff - but this would take long term planning of at least 10 years, more for doctors.

Futhermore it takes the will to do so. I see little will at the moment, with the Tory party fighting each other like ferrets in a sack. And those brave people like Johnson, who ran away when expected to put up for PM and conveniently ran away again when expected to vote against Heathrow expansion. Can you honestly see him or Grease Smug or Gove putting their shoulders to the wheel and trying to rebuild the morale and physical infrastructure of this country? Because I can't.

The assertion a few posts back that Nazism 'couldn't win' may not be true. Mr Hitler's plans although exceedingly unpleasant were successful to begin with

i didn't mean that literally Hitler couldn't have won the war through military means! I meant that his ideology could never survive long term because people will always fight it (again not literal fighting).

Now maybe that is a naive belief I hold ... but I truly do think that ideas come round in circles. We're currently circling back into the dark days of the 30s - but with the added advantage of having the 30s to compare it to. And just as last time, those ideas came to an end, and more humane heads prevailed - so too will they this time. I also hope believe that this time we can destroy these ideas and bring back liberal democracy and social conscience without the destruction of an all out war, first.

Thank you Icantreachthepretzels I believe you are lovely and don't want to upset you. Sorry for the swear. I've got a much longer reply but I'll leave it for now.

When they left, they went on to lead normal lives
Believe me, this never happens. But we want our children to survive 'cos we love them. Same story with us women and people of colour. "Paint on that smile": it's what we are taught to do.

Beautiful writer Primo Levi wrote good stuff about how he was tortured by the nazis at auschwitz ( I stayed near there once, and the evil still hangs in the air) Everyone thought he was OK, he topped himself, at 69. So much is passed on. "The Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said, at the time, "Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years later"

To bring it back to the thread, people like Milo Y, Farage, IDS, Lennon and Johnson who allude with casual sarcasm to the shoah, are laughing at our predecessors being thrown alive into ovens. So much one could say about these specimens, and they are worth so little intellectual energy.

I know how a 'racial identity' exists and is also mitigated by, having no safe nation state or security, and in recent times associated with the shoah, is ingrained into a people. Funny old business. Weaponised with such knowing malice by current 'home office'.

But thanks for the reply pretzels

I agree peregrina but my entire original point was in response to saying we could never get back to normal - pointing out that, in the case of a cancelled brexit normal was easy. (and I still firmly believe it will be cancelled).

My example of holocaust survivors building new lives was to point out that these extreme examples of having everything destroyed had found a way to move forward. I'm not claiming they were ever the same, but they did find a way back to normalcy - as in going to work, having a family, finding ways to be happy.

And considering our situation is no where near that extreme (and even in the worst case brexit scenario it is unlikely to ever be anything like the atrocities these people suffered) we can get back to 'normal' too.

You only have to look at the way most people are studiously ignoring brexit to see how 'normal' continues even under dire abnormal circumstances. If brexit was cancelled - would these people even notice? Everything would just continue for the masses as it always was. And eventually we'd even start recovering our lost growth.

.

Woman

more humane heads prevailed-

Gentile people didn't fight back much on continental Europe. They mainly just watched football, danced, listened to pop music, and ran the death camps for Jews, Gypsies and the dissidents. With several noble exceptions.

What saved "us" to a large extent was FDR; his need for Keynsian investment in armaments to boost US economy, Cretan balls and the Russian weather.

We normally don't have evil rubbed in our faces but this is at least a good lesson.

There were under 17 million jews in 1939 and by 1945, 6 million of them had died
Over ⅓ of the population
So Hitler was horrifyingly effective
and if certain battles had gone differently, or if Japan / Germany had not brought the US into the war, he could indeed have had time to murder the remaining Jews under his control

Even children of concentration camp survivors - children born well after the war - suffered psychologically due to the lasting effects on their parents.
So the damage, in a much attenuated form, was passed to the next generation.

The happy ever after story would be uplfting & inspiring, but not fully realistic
We should admire the courage and determination of survivors to rebuild their lives, but acknowledge the lasting trauma of deeds that very evil people committed, while too many others ignored.

I read "hope against hope" many years ago woman

"The privilege of ordinary heartbreak"

That sentence has never left me.

So we should be chilled too when Roma are being registered in a European country
and when hispanic children are taken away in the US, while guards lie to their parents that they are just being taken to bath

"The banality of evil" is the phrase that has stayed with me

Listening to radio 4 on the way home , what happened to Gina Miller ? She was on , but something had happened that meant she was delayed ?

If Brexit was reversed, I think we would still not go back to ‘normal’.
Actually I really hope that all that mess will mean that we don’t go back to normal.
Normal is country bitterly split in two
Normal is a democracy that isn’t working
Normal is a country where human rights are trampled on
Normal seems to be atm a place where telling lies, threatening MPs etc.. is ok. Let alone being so casual about the holocaust.

I don’t want to go back to ‘normal’. I want something better than that.
Plus the economy has already suffered a hell of a lot and will carry on even if we don’t Brexit
www.msn.com/en-gb/news/newslondon/families-on-£34-billion-borrowing-binge-since-brexit-vote-figures-reveal/ar-AAzkA8E
Basically the economy has sort of coped only because people have been borrowing to keep their standard of living. And Obvioulsy that’s not sustainable and we will have to repay all that....

So yes, for me going back to normal is more like a unicorn.

^So we should be chilled too when Roma are being registered in a European country
and when hispanic children are taken away in the US, while guards lie to their parents that they are just being taken to bath^

It's incredibly chilling. What is happening now is a tide of evil that just two years ago I thought could never happen. In fact - I never even thought about it, it was unthinkable.

This is the very tide that I believe cancelling brexit can turn back. To a certain extent brexit unleashed all this - releashing (?) it will help quell the rightwing forces in other places - along with saving us from disaster.
It will tell all the people who were racist and now think it's acceptable to be so out loud - that it isn't acceptable. They are not the silent majority (they are neither silent nor a majority). I don't think it is too late to get the genie back in the bottle, though I appreciate that other people feel differently on this.
Cancelling brexit obviously can't reunite those hispanic parents with their children - or undo the damage it has caused those caught up in it - but it can sound the first death knell for the belief that this is appropriate and OK.

And fascism can be forced back into the history books once again.

So yes, for me going back to normal is more like a unicorn.

It depends what you mean by normal. For me normal means not being terrified every moment of the day about everything being destroyed - and losing my rights and way of life. It means not obsessing over one subject and getting frustrated at other people who are not equally obsessed. It means not having to follow a MN thread religiously.

When I say 'normal' I don't mean things will be 'good'. I am rather using that brexiteer standard of 'not as bad as the black death.'

For example - I don't actually believe that Trump will start a war that we will all get caught up in.

So many things start by accident. I don't think Hitler thought that Britain would declare War on Germany. Brexit itself is something which Cameron started by accident by trying to shut his right wing up. I am quite sure he didn't plan to divide the country, and drive out EU citizens or drive out major employers, but this is what is happening. Who knows what May will blunder into?

Eventually though, I imagine that we might rejoin a reformed EU. Meanwhile when the money runs out, we might realise that the money and the need isn't there for Trident, or a new aircraft carrier. We might settle down to being a medium sized country off the north west coast of Europe,. Much further into the future, school children will be incredulous to learn that there was once an empire which spanned the globe.

I never said I have evidence for that belief
It comes from two parts inability to comprehend that something so awful could happen in my life time, and one part wishful thinking.

But this naivete does leave me with a certainty that such a thing will never happen. And I'm clinging to that until I'm proven wrong this may be why I think brexit won't happen

Hmm you see for me that has been destroyed too.
I will still not trust the HO and the government (at the very least until the conservatives have been kicked out).
As far as I am concerned, Brexit has been the nail in the coffin of my relationhsip as well as the trust I had in a country I called home.
Not brexiting won’t allow me to get that back.

Regardless of Brexit, I will be leaving the country as soon as the dcs have finished their exams (a few years down the line so I’m crossing all fingers that I can stay put until then). They’ve done irreparable damage as far as I am concerned.

woman

We are trying to decide whether to return home to the UK as planned or whether the country that we love will be a hollow shell of what we left. If it's anything like the 1980s greyness that I grew up in, there's no way I'm bringing the DC up there

My Facebook feed this morning was stuffed with a jaunty Government video explaining that the Brexit bill had got Royal assent so it was now full steam ahead - I can't find it on YouTube to post here, but I'll keep looking (I will post a health warning when I do so - it made my blood pressure shoot up somewhat....)

I can completely understand that the trust is broken irrevocably for people who settled here from abroad. And I think the H.O has destroyed all credibility and any foreign national would be crazy to not remain wary of them for years to come. But as a British citizen - I'm in a different position

Brexit is one issue threatening everything for me at the moment. But if that issue goes away - then that's me happy again.
For people in more complicated situations than mine - it is more complicated.
Whilst I understand completely that you feel done with Britain now - I hope that if we somehow manage to pull of a miraculous turning of the tables - and see an upsurge in anti-brexit feeling and pro-European feeling (like the people demonstrated last Saturday) and a destruction of the tory party/ fall of the govt you and others in your position might reconsider - and accept brexit as a mad blip that we worked to put right.

Sadly all the horrible things that have been spoken about over the last few pages of this thread are happening to many people in the world now. It is not that far away either. Taking a holiday flight over some countries you are literally 5 miles away from it (vertically). Brexit isn't specifically part of this of course but the action is making it worse in a small way by distracting from measures that would help refugees, either by helping refugees directly or by the EU and other major powers putting pressure on the governments that are 'creating' refugees. Stopping the war(s) and corruption would mean that refugee and the need for migration would be eased massively. The EU is attempting this but the crazy 'Brexit' is diverting attention and money from doing these works.

Even if Brexit goes away, the underlying issues which led to its narrow win won't. There are people still angry about the loss of their industry, with nothing of substance replacing it. There are still people who want to give the political class a good kicking, (which they fully deserve.) There are still people who value the NHS and want more money for it. Housing is broken, Education is at breaking point, although neither were Brexit issues. Even if we believe the Leavers that it wasn't about immigration, which quite frankly, I don't, there are still undercurrents of racism and xenophobia, which won't go away of their own accord.

So, even if we get Brexit cancelled, by whatever means, there is a lot of work to be done. Why doesn't somebody do something? Well, maybe that somebody is you and me?