ml1dch

£15,000 was the cost it would seem. Not paid by Ben Bradley in the end, obvs, but by Tory party donors. Edit - one of whom is CEO of the Conservative Party.

Corbyn is quite obviously a bit of a simpleton, but when people are compiling the list of villains who screwed the UK, some through malice, some through idiocy his name is going to come quite a long way down the list.

The Government has published it's proposals for the "Irish border backstop". They are quite clear, it is to be a time limited backstop (so not a backstop at all) with no specific time limit. And there will definitely be some sort of solution that will be in place. And there are loads of ways to do this, which we'll talk about another time. The wheels are falling off the clown car.

If he can hold off until Tuesday then he can do it to celebrate the 10th anniversary of his previous resignation. Back then it was partly in protest at the idea that foreign nationals should be registered and carry ID cards, which he thought was the start of the path to a national database. Now he wants to be able to register non-UK EU nationals and for them to carry ID cards. His brain must be a terribly muddled place to be.

Well, my apologies if I've misunderstood your position. But I'm sure you can appreciate that from a reader's position "23 months of posturing and then 4 weeks of bending over" and "just that as in most negotiations we'll standoff for months and months and find that in the days and hours leading up to deadline agreements will finally get made" aren't exactly the same thing

Apologies if it sounds patronising, but it's not really a prediction. It's all there, in black and white in the EU Notices to Stakeholders. One through sixty-six. Two new ones came out today, Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights and Preferential Origins of Goods. They're pretty dry and technical, granted. But they tell you exactly what will happen. It's an absolute legal consequence of our current position. Now, it might not come to pass. But unless the Government bends until it breaks, that is how this plays out. Not with Davis and Barnier discussing quotas at the end of March next year until they pop out at 10pm sharing a cigar and a back-slap On the bright side, the Government has capitulated every step of the way so far when it's mattered. So you'll probably be fine.

I'm pretty sure I got the right end of the stick, I just don't think you appreciate that this isn't two parties haggling over who gets what, and that the delay isn't a case of which side blinks first. Bicks pretty much covered it. This is us saying "we want all this stuff", them saying "to get that, you need to do this, this and this". Us saying "we told people we can't do that". Them saying "fine, that's not our problem". Rinse and repeat once a month for the last year. Nothing has moved. We are still at Day 1. We're at the absolute beginning of this. And we'll stay there until we either agree to basically stay in, or walk away and ruin the country. Literal food shortages, fuel-rationing, troops on the streets ruin the country. And the people in charge know this (well, some of them), which is why they are petrified of both choices. And they won't make it until they're forced to, either by parliament or the Commission. Quotas, tax rates, access, benefits etc might as well be in another galaxy.

That's because the two sides hold irreconcilable positions, and have done since the beginning. If you think that there will be a last minute agreement and everything will just slot neatly into place, whose position do you think is going to change from it's current one? What the UK is asking for is the effective breakdown of the Single Market. What the EU is asking for (or rather saying has to be the case for the UK to get what they want) is for the UK to stay in all the institutions that "the people" have told them to get out of. Neither of those things are going to suddenly change whether they discuss it for a week, a year or a decade.

If you listen to the Telegraph podcast or regularly read Conservative Home (masochistically, both of which I do), it's still a pretty solid mantra.

Government playing catch-up as usual. Edit: reading back, I got at least one thing wrong. Animal produce wouldn't just sit and wait until it had cleared. Calais doesn't have the relevant infrastructure, so they'd be turned back and told to take a boat to Dunkirk or Le Havre, which do.

You know that you're in a bit of a bind when the people throwing around sarcastic suggestions to take the piss are coming up with more credible ideas than the Government's own plans. It's a bit weird. You'd have thought that from 17.4m voters, there would be one amongst them who could put forward a way to actually do it. Still, they know what they voted for. It's just really difficult to put it into words...

So it looks like the Government's accepted that neither of it's magical customs plans will work. Just like anyone with brains cells in double figures could have told them (and did) weeks ago. Not to worry - there's a new plan. A ten mile combined regulatory zone all along the border. Seeing Northern Ireland both inside the EU, and outside it. It'll be fine. EU standards and regulations both will apply and won't apply. There will be ECJ oversight and there also won't be. The cat will be both simultaneously alive and dead. You couldn't have written this any more farcically if you'd tried.

They keep hunger locked up 'til lunch as well.

I don't know who he is, but as his feelings are broadly in line with my post above, I have no doubt that he is an excellent fellow who knows exactly what he's talking about!

It’s a snappy way of looking at the situation, but the reality is a bit more complex. A bit like the mantra that “Ireland voted against Lisbon and were told by the EU to vote again”, it’s not really the reality of it. This isn’t an unprecedented situation. It’s not uncommon for a President to veto the appointment of an individual minister (2014 was the last time I think). Normally, they just crack on and appoint somebody else. Salvini was told before that Savona wouldn’t be acceptable, but he decided that it would be better not to govern at all than carry on with somebody else (see the bit about clever politicking below). So, why was he an unacceptable choice? It’s lazy to say that it’s that “they simply cannot have eurosceptics in positions of power”. Pretty much all the ministers suggested are eurosceptic, including potential future Minister of the Interior Salvini himself, and all the others were perfectly acceptable apart from Savona. During the elections, the euroscepticism of both parties was dialled back, and membership of the Euro wasn’t really discussed. Mattarella has basically said that if membership of the Euro is going to be called into question, then it should be talked about and that voters should be voting on it, if a party goes into an election with that aim and wins then he would be an appropriate choice. Not, a coalition comes to power and decides that they are going to start down that path having not campaigned on it. And people can whinge about the undemocratic Italians, but that’s their system. Appointments have been rejected before, and they’ll be rejected again. Had I been Mattarella, I’d have just gone with it and allowed the 5 Star / Lega Nord shambles to collapse in a couple of weeks under the weight of its own contradictions, thus avoiding this altogether. But Salvini has depressingly, played this extremely well. Given he knew beforehand that the Savona wouldn’t be approved, he’s basically done this without any intention of forming a Government, but just to bank some extra “look at the horrible elites” points before the inevitable next elections. Excellent politicking, and there’s a good chance he’ll be electorally rewarded for it. On the flip side, there’s also a fairly plausible scenario that this was his one shot at (very short term) power. As for Oettinger’s remarks, they’re not particularly tactful. But nor is reporting them as a threat (as many outlets are doing) particularly tactful either. He’s just saying that if a country suggests they might want to rip up their monetary system and start again from scratch, then people are going to try and take their money out of that system before it happens. Not a threat, just a pretty obvious statement of how capitalist markets work. For example, if HSBC told me that they were about to put John McDonnell in charge, I’d probably think that it might be time for a flight of my pretty meagre capital from them before it happened. Edit - apologies for the lecture, that turned into a much longer post than I expected.

Ha ha. When even that complete moron Dominic Cummings is writing stuff like this, it's probably safe to say that the rats in the sack are about to chew each other to pieces. ...All this contributes to current delusional arguments over supposed ‘models’ (hybrid/max fac etc) that even on their own terms cannot solve the problem of multiple incompatible promises. ‘Compromise proposals’ such as that from Boles which assume the existence of ‘third country’ planning are just more delusions. It doesn’t matter which version of delusion your gangs finally agree on if none of them has a basis in reality and so long as May/Hammond continue they will have no basis in reality. You can dance around the fundamental issues all you want but in the end ‘reality cannot be fooled’. The Government effectively has no credible policy and the whole world knows it. By not taking the basic steps any sane Government should have taken from 24 June 2016, including providing itself with world class legal advice, it’s ‘strategy’ has imploded. It now thinks its survival requires surrender, it thinks that admitting this risks its survival, it thinks that the MPs can be bullshitted by clever drafting from officials, and that once Leave MPs and donors — you guys — are ordering your champagne in the autumn for your parties on 30 March 2019 you will balk at bringing down the Government when you finally have to face that you’ve been conned. Eurosceptics are full of **** and threats they don’t deliver, they say in No10, and on this at least they have a point. This set of problems cannot be solved by swapping ‘useless X’ for ‘competent Y’ or ‘better spin’. This set of problems cannot be solved by listening to charlatans such as the overwhelming majority of economists and ‘trade experts’ who brand themselves pro-Brexit, live in parallel universes, and spin fantasies to you. https://dominiccummings.com/2018/05/23/on-the-referendum-25-a-letter-to-tory-mps-donors-on-the-brexit-shambles/

Next time your friendly local journalist / BBC talking head / shadow cabinet member solemnly tells you that the only way to have frictionless trade or to "solve the Irish border problem" is to be in a Customs Union, the Commission has knocked up a handy slide for them. The bits in red are solved by a Customs Union, the bits in black are solved by the Single Market. And although we might not need to worry about our curry leaf or Guar gum industries, the whole of "products of animal origin"? Well, we do a bit of that.

This is probably the relevant place for a Eurovision quip.

Street Fighter II cosplay. Half an E.Honda costume, half a Chun Li costume.

It's nice, but it's no different to what they did in 2014. Which isn't a criticism, the World Cup add-on in 2014 was great.

Looks like the country is going to be ungovernable for a while then. For context - if last night's results were applied at a parliamentary level, the Conservatives would lose enough seats that meant that even the DUP deal still wouldn't be enough for a majority. Yet, Labour would need to win every target seat up to Nuneaton (81st on their list) to have a majority to match John Major's from 1992, which was the start of five years of parliamentary chaos. And last night they lost votes and seats to the Conservatives in Nuneaton. Looks like a Labour / Lib Dem / SNP / PC coalition next time around as the maths probably won't allow anything else

Julian Smith the Conservative Chief Whip has apparently told cabinet that the Government doesn't have the votes needed to defeat the Customs Union amendment. As Ian Dunt put it yesterday, we are watching the tiny dreams of very unimaginative people finally circle around the drain and disappear

They could have made it even cheaper if they'd knocked through to Brian Glover's house next door and hooked up to his gas supply.

If I were to indulge in groundless speculation, I would be going along the lines of needing to rent the cheapest possible property to give them the local address which I assume you need to be able to run for the local council.