Westminstenders: Stalemate

[RedToothBrush]

After May's Meaningless Vote defeat and Corbyns Pointless Vote for Your Own Party defeat we are well and truly at Stalemate.

May has invited other parties to come and talk to her to find a compromise. Except she has so many red lines all she is asking is for everyone else to compromise whilst she gets exactly what she wants.

Corbyn made a tactical error in not initially speaking to May, so now she gets to say that its Labour who are being difficult and not wanting to work together in the national interest.

Corbyn has in addition put down the red line of saying he won't talk to May until she agrees to drop no deal. Except since no deal is the default until an alternative solution is agreed! Corbyn is expecting May to say that she would revoke if there was no alternative agreed, whilst is isn't really reasonable from a compromise point of view.

They are as bad as each other. Both too stubborn for the country to move forward. Its long been said that they were alike in this respect, but having it put to the test about which is more stubborn has the potential to destory the country in the process.

In addition to this, Leadsom has removed all other Brexit related HoC business from the schedule until after the 29th January. This is a blantant attempt to try and stop backbenchers having the opportunity to table pesky amendments which the government don't like.

The 29th January is due to be the Meaningless Vote II. Given that May has made it clear that in her head 'compromise' means 'do exactly what I want and capitulate' it looks like the Withdrawal Agreement will be represented to parliament to vote on with little change. Perhaps with a few amendments there designed to attract support, though it remains to be seen where this support will come from given the spectulator level of the rejection the HoC gave it. May's Plan is literally to run the clock down and hold a gun of no deal to the head of remain leaning MPs or to scare Brexiteers by suggesting that she might revoke or there might be an extension.

Its beyond farce.

Of course the role of the Speaker becomes paramount.

Technically speaking no bill can be presented to the HoC twice in the same parliament. Its against the rules. So how is May going to get around this, and will the Speaker indeed allow it?

The Speaker may also try and help backbenchers out by allowing amendments and motions to be tabled outside the normal rules. Normally the government alone control the majority of parliamentary time, with the opposition parties being given so many debates depending on whether they are the official opposition and then according to their size. Backbenchers don't tend to get much parliamentary time. However the Speaker's actions last week showed he was willing to be creative and bend the rules to allow backbenchers more influence and power than under normal circumstances because of the way that the Executive was trying to frustrate the house. So not timetabling any further Brexit Business between now and the 29th January seems a sure fire way to have the Government straight on course for another run in with Bercow.

So what next:

Do not forget that whatever happens May has to agree to it, or we go to no deal. Whether that be a 2nd Ref, Revoking, Staying in the Customs Union, Norway + or Any Other Alternative May has to agree to it on some level.

Backbenchers can table amendments all day long to 'guide' or put pressure on May but they may not be able stop her ultimately. Boles, Grieve, Benn and Cooper seem to be the ones to watch.

So May's stubborness is the biggest barrier and issue there is to preventing No Deal.

Corbyn, whilst he might well be very right to avoid getting sucked into May's trap, isn't helping matters with his own stubborness. His priority is party politics and stopping the Labour Party from splitting. Not solving Brexit.

There is not a shread of pragmatism nor thought for the national interest between them. Party before Country.

So we are to go through all of the last week, possibly with another vote of no confidence thrown in for good measure in another 12 days.

Won't that be fun?

twitter.com/ThatTimWalker/status/1086217099142488065

Apparently in Brexitania, job losses are a thing to rejoice at for the faithful.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/18/cheering-no-deal-question-time-brexit

That's worrying, pootles

I'm assuming the NHS has fallback plans for reallocating staff, rationing treatment, rationing meds etc
but it's locked up in a vault somewhere

However, emergency plans always need an extensive test phase and test runs, to find out (some of) what theyve forgotten.

Mind you, I assumed that the Cameron govt / civil service had hidden scoping reports and properly worked out contingency plans for brexit
So, despite being called out for negativity on these threads before, I probably trust our lords & masters too much

I agree BcF but I'm not far up the food chain so maybe I'm not meant to know.

In idle moments I imagine a post-Brexit world of no food in the shops, fights at Lidl checkouts for the last bread roll, and me nit being able to get the meds I rely on to stay functioning, and wonder if I'll be expected to turn up to treat out patients for on going healthcare. I can't imagine patients turning up.

There has to be contingency plans but, at the moment I have serious doubts as to how much planning there really is.

A lot of my patients already use food banks, rely on buses to get to appointments, and depend on social housing and care to get what they need day to day. If chaos breaks out I can't see them coming along to see me.

Frankly, I might be too busy taking care of my child who probably wouldnt be at school, and trying to find a pharmacy that has my medication as well as eking out my food stockpile to come to work to treat them.

Since the government has departments to work out the mortality rates of various government actions it would be intriguing to know what sort of numbers they are coming up with.
When the USA deploys a drone or fighter jet to 'eliminate something or someone, they (reputedly) have a lawyer and accountant standing by to assess the 'political' damage.
Churchill's hope was to get 20,000 back from Dunkirk and was presumably delighted to get over 300,000 back alive.
We are just numbers on a spreadsheet.

@DGRossetti Which insurer did you work for?

As it happens @FishesaPlenty I'm an insurance professional.

'A few bits of paper' to you are the following to our insurers:

• Significant time and expense writing requirements, would amount to weeks if not months of effort across the people who would input, write and review. Particularly as most people who would have known anything about he GC system may not be working any more

• More months of effort to build and test the system changes

• Training for all of your hundreds of front line staff.

Then there is the small matter of the cost of issuing thousands of them per annum and dealing with the inbound call volumes.

The project alone I would estimate to be a 3-4 month project and would probably cost in the region of £200k without any of the ongoing costs.
Insurers make c. 5% margin on average (across all products, as DGR says they don't make much at all on motor) so they will have had to earn £4M of income from consumers to pay for it.

And that's for each insurer.

There are at a guess 40+ companies offering motor insurance in the UK (albeit you mainly hear about the top 10).

Conservatively the insurance industry will have had to bring in £160M of income from consumers to create the ability for Green Cards when we don't even know if it's needed yet.

But sure....it's 'just a bit of paper'.

umpteen that the problem though, nobody knows what is needed yet. We just know that it is needed soon.

www.europarl.europa.eu/plenary/EN/vod.html?mode=chapter&vodLanguage=EN&startTime=20190116-08:39:57-447# Check out the EU parliamentary debate on Brexit, they are so grown up.

umpteennamechanges
Thank you, a realistic interpretation of what a 'bit of paper' means in the real world.
Many years ago I was told that an employee writing something on a bit of paper and taking it to a nearby desk for further work, represents about £10.
£25.05p to tighten a screw is not expensive. It is 5p to actually tighten the screw, and £25 to know which screw to tighten.

I've added (dark) chocolate digestives to my pile. Cheap, lovely, calorific, what's not to like?
Catfood is more problematic because Mrs Fussy won't eat the same type two meals running.

LeClerc
£25.05p to tighten a screw is not expensive. It is 5p to actually tighten the screw, and £25 to know which screw to tighten.
As my "tagline" on Ebay has always said ....
Counting the beans £1
Knowing which beans to count £99

Sadly the political muppets making decisions do not respect expertise in any field
except rhetoric

LBC just did an hour’s poll on listeners preferred Brexit outcome. Revoke and Remain won (seventy-something votes, I forget the exact figure) with No Deal close behind on 69. May’s Deal got two votes, as did Canada. Can’t remember Norway but very few. It does chime with the sense of Leavers getting behind No Deal in a big way. I don’t think many people actually considered the version of Brexit they were voting for and there’s no support for Norway, Canada etc as it’s easy for Brexiteer MPs to point out how bad theses options are. They are known and therefore can be demonstratively proven to be worse than our current deal, whereas we can’t point to an actual, existing No Deal situation and say ‘see, No Deal will be just like that, much worse than any other option’. Even though logical thought should lead you to certain conclusions about what No Deal would be, it’s all theoretical in too many people’s minds and all too easy for them to fall for the it-will-all-be-fine-don’t-fall-for-project-Fear merchants.

TiP Your tagline is perfect

I think this has probably been posted from a couple of days ago. Apologies if it's a repeat.

I wonder how many of our EU or indeed UK politicians would be so insightful...

When this all started 'Brexit' meant any one of a number of options...a lot of Leavers talked about Norway and the EEA/EFTA.

Now apparently only a 'no deal' = Brexit.

Bigchoc
I've had it, and this username since 2006 It has stood the test of time

Argghh, I'm biting my tongue because someone on my SM timeline has posted that we needed to "just get on with it" so we can move onto fixing funding problems for schools (she's a teacher) and the NHS.

Goodness me, people are sure going to be disappointed when they finally get what they've been asking for.

@DGRossetti Which insurer did you work for?

Professional courtesy means I don't feel it's necessary to name them ... but you'd have heard of them

Let's put it this way ... we had a 3-year project to accommodate the gender ruling, which while it was running pretty much put everything else on hold. Especially as Solvency II was in the mix too.

The Leave position is just getting worse. It's terrifying.

In two years it's shifted from politicians and people saying Leave means Norway, to now it means no deal. In part I blame May's oft bleated mantra- "No deal is better". People now believe that.

But I think it can't and won't stabilise- even if an horrific Brexit is delivered, the Leave position will continue to worsen, seeking other things to demand. It might be leaving the UN, or hostility to non whites. The word Brexit is not an end destination -it's an ideology that is insatiable , we can already see signs it will never be satisfied.

Remain should (seriously) have pulled towards a hard remain as a negotiating stance ... selling joining the Euro etc to give a way for a compromise in the middle.As sticking to the status quo is simply very hard to sell in any context.

By the time we have Brexited, there will be fuck all left to protect.

You have made a desert and called it a peace

Having just listened to Guy Verhofstadt's piece and some others from the earlier EU clip, I then listened to Farage and Batten.
What an embarrassment. It is worth listening to as an indication of how buggered the UK really is, and how much effort it is going to take to get out of the hole. With the likes of Farage and Batten furiously digging the hole deeper as fast as possible the outcome is not going to be good.
I don't know who the hecklers were during parts of some of the other speeches but they didn't go down well. I am presuming they were British.

Ha ha if any teachers think No Deal including limiting unskilled immigration will improve education. I posted this on another thread:
The problem with restricting immigration for unskilled labour, and not for skilled labour, is that the native population then has to provide most of the unskilled labour, whereas skills can be imported. Consequently there is little incentive to educate and upskill the native population - why would you, when it can dig holes, pick vegetables, clean toilets? No annoying ever increasing education budget, cheaper doctors/engineers/IT specialists from abroad, and a subliterate population, easy to keep happy with reality shows/video games/celeb gossip.
I can see why it would appeal to some.

This thought does sometimes cross my mind about the BBC in general. The fact that everyone from all sides seems to think it is against them maybe suggests it's doing a better job of remaining impartial than we give it credit for. After all if it wasn't surely someone would be happy with their coverage.

Or some sides are more vocal about complaining.

@DGRossetti I worked on Solvency II for a good couple of years, but it took my employer (at that time) around 4 years to put it into place pretty much.

It's the only possible silver lining for me...if the UK changes the framework in the future I should get some work out of it now that I'm a contractor. That being said I used to work in an EMEA head office and now that has gone to Luxembourg and the jobs we all did no longer exist here

@umpteennamechanges

I was much less coal-face. Strategies my bag. Or was . But I started in the insurance industry via an aggregator, and had very close-hand exposure to the rizla-thin margins in domestic motor insurance.

(I also devised an AI system to game quotes, but that's for another lifetime).

I knew there'd be some smart alec that would try and say "it's just a piece of paper" ... about anything really. Normally I'm of an age where it washes over. But motor (and general) insurance are areas I know, and I know anyone who has worked in them would know the score.

It's a hallmark of Brexit that you get underthinkers commenting on things they really know fuck all about. Starting at the top (Treeza) and trickling down. Not so much trickle down economics, as trickle down ignorance.

Like all the posters who sit back and tell us all "how it is in Europe" based on the picture on a postcard they received from an Aunt in 1987.

DB (so English accent despite living in the US since 1994 and becoming a US citizen) was out with some friends at Xmas when he visited. He was initially amused and then annoyed as some of them started explaining "how it is in the US".

I'm loosely in the jobs market and please of my other EU passport.