Westminstenders: Crisis. What Crisis

[RedToothBrush]

October is slowly rolling into November.

Your eyes, rightly, will be distracted by events the other side of the pond.

It won't be good and it won't be pretty and it will have an impact on what happens here in relation to Brexit in one way or another.

May seems to have headed off trouble makers for now. But that means nothing if she can't get a deal through parliament.

And if you think we are in anyway prepared for No Deal I'd like whatever drugs you are taking. That way lies only disorder and to put it bluntly, deaths.

We MUST find a deal, any deal to prevent that. Desperation is the final ingredients in this mess. Who will blink as they realise what's at stake?

The problem is though, is too few MPs have grasped what's at state, such is the quality of our elected representatives. And that's the truly terrifying bit.

If they can't work out the risk of no deal, they certainly not equipped to handle the fall out of no deal.

If you want to shit yourself anymore, I'd like to take this opportunity to remind you that the minister responsible for hauling all your food and medical supplies in the event if no deal, is Mr Christopher Grayling.

Start praying.

Well, I'm one of those £100 merchants and even if I were eligible to vote in a UK GE, nothing could bribe me to vote Conservative. My DDs will be OK - they will have their lovely burgundy passports to take them away from the UK. Their friends - bright young people with a real future ahead of them - don't have that option. I won't forgive.

Kenn The UK could go to the Minfordian Free Trade extreme and not impose any hard borders against the entire rest of the world.
That would be OK by WTO / WCO rules

That's been proposed as one way to avoid logjammed ports - but it doesn't solve the problem of jams at the EU end as they check UK exports,
which would mean UK lorries queuing at UK ports, waiting to get into France etc

One way to really avoid logjams is to prevent any UK lorries carrying exports from going to any port.
So, just allow imports in from anywhere

Of course, that would bugger UK trade, but we have the resources to keep solvent like that for at least a year.
That might mean selling off the remainder of the UK family silver though

Another problem with totally open UK borders is:
who on earth would want to negotiate trade deals with the UK if they already have the best access to the UK market they ever have.

@BigChocFrenzy

Thank you, I knew that about WTO rules, wondered if we would face any consequences with the U.N. for breaking the GFA though.

Hammond is a grown up and intelligent and has at least some principles.
With an eye on a future judge led review I suspect, he has produced a sunlight and unicorns budget with a very obvious warning.
Despite his coy ' top bunnies have escaped the hat ' comment I suspect he was only too happy to be left with the boring bits to announce anew.

There is some speculation that this has the hallmarks of a pre snap election budget. Personally I don't think there is any appetite amongst Tories for an election, barring accidents. I think it more likely they are boosting consumer confidence to keep us spending ahead of any brexit turbulence. If there is no deal, he will pull most of it anyway.

Agreed

Kenn A country can end a treaty at any time, provided it gives any notice prescribed in the treaty
(the GFA gave no notice, because neither party at the time even considered the possibility of ending the treaty or reneging on the terms)

However, the GFA didn't really define what kind of border would be acceptable in the future, if need arose,
so it might be difficult in court, say the ICJ (Internation Court of Justice) to prove the case.

However, the UK has lost its judge in the ICJ for the first time since the court was founded in 1946, so that's significant lost influence in court

The really effective sanctions on the UK over the NI border:

• The EU won't negotiate post-Brexit on any trade deal until the UK signs the backstop.

• Non-EU International public opinion, especially in countries with a substantial population from Ireland, e.g. the USA,
  may mean those countries refuse to sign trade deals or have problems getting them passed in PArliament / Congress

• The Troubles could break out again and Republicans revert to the tactic which originally forced the UK to the negotiating table without the preconditions on the IRA that it wanted:
  highly targeted bombing of the City of London

Maybe the final straw after Brexit for several financial institutions and there is mass business flight out of the City

Has austerity really ended ?
Not for the working poor or working JAMs:

The freeze in working-age benefits for next year will still go ahead, saving £1.5bn.

After a Brexit crash out, those benefits might be savagely cut, some of them even abolished

Given how much buying EU passport costs an extra 130 quid isn't going to work for me.

Probably just the govt keeping the public quiet and happy, with budget promises they know they can't fulfill.

It postpones and distracts from the problems for another week or two

Typical Theresa May, any old rubbish to survive a little longer

Number of refused British applications for Irish passports rises dramatically

and total applications too, of course

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/number-of-refused-british-applications-for-irish-passports-rises-dramatically-1.3679783?mode=amp

Over 15,000 applications were turned down last year, up from just one refusal in 2016

@BigChocFrenzy
Thank you.

English ignorance about Ireland just isn’t funny anymore

https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/abroad/english-ignorance-about-ireland-just-isn-t-funny-anymore-1.3677267

Last month, some video footage went viral in Ireland of a group of English men verbally abusing young women at a Dublin housing crisis protest.

The men, it turned out, were part of a stag party from Bristol and seemed to be dressed intentionally to look like a cartoon of landed gentry,
in tweeds and the loudly coloured trousers widely beloved by braying men of a certain kind.

It would have been a strange incident in any case,
these English men who look like relics of the landlord class shouting at young Irish people rendered desperate because of skyrocketing rents,
but it was to become more absurd still.

After calling the women “scroungers” and demanding to know whether they had jobs,
one of the men took the decapitated head of a pigeon out of his pocket and threw it at them.
....
Two weeks ago I visited Birmingham while the Conservative Party Conference was being held.

All around me were examples of the worst elements of the English ruling class:
their solipsism, their hatred of the poor, their amazing rudeness.

A man in a boater hat and cravat, drinking Champagne and smoking a cigar,
ignored a homeless woman asking for change and then chided me when I gave her some.
...
The extent to which many English people are ignorant about Ireland has become painfully clear.

Crucial questions about how to avoid a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic

• a border abolished in the Good Friday Agreement, the reintroduction of which would be inextricably associated with the preceding decades of violence and unrest - remain unresolved, months before Brexit is slated to become official.

(Perhaps that’s in part because they were being dismissed as “this Irish stuff” by the likes of the former Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith as late as last winter,
even as people on both sides of the border pleaded for a solution.)

Secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Karen Bradley, recently admitted with startling candor that she didn’t know basic facts about the politics of the region where she is in charge
...
In the midst of all this, I’ve noticed a tonal shift in the way I and other Irish people speak about the English.
Our anger is more sincere.
We are more ready to call them out on all those centuries of excess,
more likely to object to those pink-trousered, pink-faced dinosaurs who still perceive us as their inferiors.

< hence very unlikely that Varadkhar will roll over for England, because the great majority of Irish people want him to stand firm >

I found these two articles really interesting this evening:

www.linkedin.com/pulse/sun-tsu-brexit-ii-european-union-from-technical-myopia-dehousse/

www.linkedin.com/pulse/sun-tsu-brexit-how-brexiteers-turned-total-strategic-mess-dehousse/

So, we've messed up more, but the EU could have also thought a bit more strategically?

This is a clip of the English tourists chucking the pigeon's head at the protestors as mentioned in Bigchoc's IT article above:
twitter.com/bitnch/status/1043496116120117248?s=19

It takes serious arrogance to visit another country and shout abuse at young women who are legitimately protesting. And who carries around a pigeon's head in their pocket?

US hedge fund puts Britain's biggest care home operator up for sale

A foretaste of what would come with a US trade deal,
but with chunks of the NHS - e.g. dialysis service, screening services for breast, bowel cancer - instead of care homes ?

www.theguardian.com/business/2018/oct/29/us-hedge-fund-orders-sale-britain-biggest-care-home-operator-four-seasons-h2-capital-partners

It will get to the point where one English stag party too many will tip the whole thing into pitched battles.

Alan Brophy
‏ @Bigalphy
Sep 23
Replying to @bitnch @Donal_OKeeffe

It's trousers like that, that lost them the empire.

-In the event of no no deal austerity will go on...and on...and on...for another 5 YEARS.

• the budget will get DUP votes because it plans on 1bn for northern Ireland

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/budget-2018-philip-hammond-brexit-eu-no-deal-theresa-may-austerity-a8607766.html

British men abroad are a nightmare. Though tbf they are a nightmare here to.

Also where's red??

{British men abroad are a nightmare. Though tbf they are a nightmare here to.}
As a man born in Britain but living 'abroad' I object to that sweeping statement. For what it is worth I spent a while discussing Brexit and the total shambles quietly with my Very European friend yesterday evening.
Most of the rest of the world would prefer that the disgusting stag and hen 'do's were contained within the UK.

I am much more likely to be a drunken yob than DH

Where’s Red? - I was wondering this too.

Nope not all men.
But you have to acknowledge that British men have a reputation abroad for creating mayhem and behaving .... not very well. And there is a reason for it.

I would actually say that a lot of british people behave abroad in ways they would never dare doing at home too (so Not just men or stag and hen dos).

It would be interesting to see the reason behind it. But having read the book Watching the English, I suspect this is because there is less social pressure to behave in a certain way when they are abroad and they just let loose, releasing the strong social pressure that exist in the U.K.