Awol

The 'empowering the HoC' line is rubbish.The Withdrawal Agreement is a legally binding international treaty, once it's signed there's nothing Parliament can do about it after the fact. She's a very devious piece of work.

Three oral statements later: May with Brexit; Leadsom with Business Statement; Barclay (Brexit Minister) with EU Exit - Article 50.... Big day, if she makes a play to extend A50 then no question about 48 letters going in and a confidence vote.

Could easily imagine enough Brexiteer MPs voting with Labour just to put a stake through the heart of May's deal - and her Premiership. It's beyond farce.

Parliament, and it would take considerable time, requiring A50 to be extended. That only flies in Brussels if Remain is on the ballot.

The judgement earlier today on revoking A50 stated that option falls once a WA is signed. On that basis Remainers would - perversely - be better off voting for no-deal, thus giving themselves until March 29th to try and grab the wheel of government.

By 5pm Brady should have more mail than Santa.

I don't think there's a chance of the vote taking place!

Not that keen on reading the last 300 pages to catch up, so i'll take a wild guess that everyone is still happy with how it's going?

No. The Tories won't touch the Oligarchs holding Putin's cash in London and the opposition leader has demonstrated he's onside regardless. We should seize the assets, accounts and holdings of everyone in London who is associated with Putin and use it it re-establish the disbanded CBRN regiment. That's trolling.

They only stayed in Salisbury for a short time because there was cold slush on the ground. So they went directly back home to Moscow, in March. Troll level: Expert.

Okay. What is your evidence for scenarios 1-3? Any evidence at all that you have gleaned would be cool. I'm assuming you haven't just made them up and there is something to lead you to rank order these scenarios over the painstakingly assembled case put forward by the British authorities?

**** it i'll bite. German Parliamentarians weren't briefed, Merkel and the BND were, and they believed what they heard. Let's flip this. What do you think happened?

@peterms Mate, you state no evidence was supplied to EU nations. The EU nations stated they expelled Russian 'diplomats' on the basis of the evidence supplied by the UK. Your rationalisation is based on a total falsehood. I'll leave it there.

The combined analysis of UK agencies (signals, human and technical intelligence) has concluded these guys are GRU. They flew to and from Moscow on genuine Russian passports. We, as punters, have two options: we accept the integrated assessment of our police and intelligence services, having pieced together sufficient evidence for the CPS to charge these miscreants with murder, or we reject all of that and chose to believe Russia and their shills in the West, because...what? If you want all of the analysis including secret methods of collection laid out in public to satisfy the latter group (who will never be satisfied) then yes, you are asking too much. Just the initial assessment was enough for most EU countries to conclude they did it and hoof dozens of Russian diplomats from their capitals. Ditto the US and Canada. Do you reckon they did that on a whim, or maybe the secret intelligence shared with their professional intelligence agencies the time closed the deal? They've got these **** arriving in UK traced their movements in UK, found traces of nerve agent in their London hotel room, clocked their recce of Salisbury and then again the following day in the vicinity of the Skripal's house when the attack was carried out, before they GTFO immediately through Heathrow and back to Vlad's loving arms. Anyone still believing Russia's version of events (or one of the 30-40 separate disinformation narratives they've advanced) is doing so because they want to, not because of a lack of evidence.

Positively identifying the perpetrators & tying them to the GRU is a bit more than nothing. Also makes it more difficult for states that stayed on the fence & the conspiracy loons to keep dissembling & deflecting on behalf of Russia - though the latter will doubtless try. Obviously Putin will never hand over his own agents but it helps to further solidify an international front against the Kremlin.

Bold: Disagree. Any systemic change is major by definition, and in any system there are powerful vested interests that will resist change with everything they’ve got to maintain their relative advantage. That’s normal - and broadly what I took from the posts about slavery up-thread. We’re there right now with our political class and the establishment, the majority of whom resolutely do not want Brexit to go forward. When the machinery responsible for planning a change is actually opposing it you end up in a mess by design, as yet another tactic in frustrating the change and maintaining the vested interests. Annecdote alert: shortly before Boris jumped I was in a meeting at the FCO and got chatting to a fairly senior CS bod afterwards, about the opportunity post-Brexit to synthesise the efforts of FCO, DfID, MOD, Treasury and HMRC to produce a joined up 21stCentury framework for HMG to engage with the world. He looked at me like I’d shot his dog. “Why did I assume it (Brexit) was going to happen?” Beyond the day to day work that was required no future thinking was being done because it wasn’t a timeline under consideration. It’s only my word so you can take that however you like, but if the people responsible for change are refusing to engage with it seriously then moving seamlessly from one flow chart to the next isn’t an option. I also couldn’t disagree more about the importance of who is proposing legislation, but at its root I’m all for transnational cooperation and dead against transnational governance. Democracy needs to be as local as possible or pretty soon it will cease being democracy. You might say that’s esoteric, polemical or whatever, but I think it’s a fundamental principle. When we get the basics wrong we can’t expect to get anything else right.

It may turn out that way but as it stands the main two are tearing themselves apart. As we hit the centrifugal forces of the party conferences that is likely to accelerate, imo. I agree both Westminster and Brussels are corrupt but in London we do have the ability to remove the executive. I think that’s why Brussels is able to operate the way it does and represents the greater threat. We’re not a million miles apart in our views, though - at least not on this

Confirmation bias, on both sides. You always believed it will be a disaster so when people you already agree with feed those opinions back to you they become ever more entrenched. I see those same opinions and disagree. You cite experts, I point out their utter failure to forecast anything to date. We all get very cross and nothing changes. When we’re actually out I expect the totally irreconcilables will self-segregate and the rest will come around to the opportunities we have to actually do things differently, united in the view that the politicians have utterly failed. That will be interesting, but until then 99% of discourse is fairly pointless bitching and cheap insults that’s worth just filtering out.

I’ve got no faith in the Tories, never did. As I’ve argued to you for years this is a process. The UK and the West more broadly is slowly circling the plug hole, our politics is corrupt, shallow & venal. Media is the same deal, in bed with the former. The EU was (is) the apogee of thee convergence between big business and political sleeze, lobbyists and consultants greasing the wheels with no accountability as decisions are stitched up behind closed doors. Imho we need a radical decentralization of power combined with root and branch reform of politics and our institutions. It’s going to be ugly, messy and prolonged. The political parties or coalitions of different groups to push it don’t exist yet, but that’s a process and it’s coming, the political market place demands it. We all know the current system is broken beyond repair. Phase one is leaving the EU which will shatter our corrupt and closed party system as we know it. Phase two is having our internal scraps and figuring out a new way forward. The Brexit vote demonstrates that the inertia of the status quo isn’t viable. It’s not just us either, this is coming all over the West imho. The fall of Trump may well trigger something similar in the US. We’ll fix it when we’re forced to fix it. Brexit is the systemic shock that can break the inertia holding back the next necessary political evolution we need to take.

If you believe something is the right thing to do, reject the counter arguments not to do it, and then get the chance to do it, you’d have to have not really believed it in the first place to then not follow through.

The House of Lords is a revising chamber without power to legislate. (I’d love to see it reformed once someone comes forward with a workable plan) The people who vote in the HoC are answerable to the electorate directly, as individuals. MEPs are not directly accountable as individuals and in any case don’t draft legislation, the Commission does. The democratic deficit in the EU model is a thing, it’s well noted & us arguing in circles about it doesn’t get to the bigger issue: The point is no one voted to offshore the responsibility of legislating for the people of the UK to a foreign entity. That process of outsourcing is extended piece by piece as the EU extends the areas for which it has responsibility. It’s headed in a direction which is only disputed in the UK by people who prefer not to frighten the horses. First they pretend it’s not happening, when that fails they claim it’s a small thing of little consequence and finally that we can’t leave because actually we are so interwoven and reliant on the EU it’s too dangerous or too complicated to leave, or our own institutions have atrophyed out of existence because everything is done by the EU. The patent dishonesty of the whole thing is repulsive and many people understand it. When we were finally asked directly if we approved of this situation the public answered that no, actually, they didn’t. We’re now waiting for Merkel’s meeting with Putin to decide what the EU’s policy towards Moscow is going to be. F*** that for a game of soldiers.

We need a foreign institution to “curb the worst excesses” of the people we freely elect to represent us? Brexit in a nutshell.

Even now, after everything, this is basically a version of “if only we’d explained a bit harder how terrible leaving would be, Remain would’ve won.” No. That was laid on by the ton before the vote, so blood curdling that it became a bit of a joke. We still voted to leave. Fear didn’t and doesn’t work. What Remain failed to do then and is still failing to do now is articulate a positive vision of the future in the EU. Where’s it going to be in 10 years or 20 years, what are the institutions going to look like? Where are the borders going to be, where will it end? Will expansion end? How are they going to fix the Eurozone? There’s a bucket full of genuine and valid questions Leave voters had that are completely ignored by a Remain campaign, who never tried to win the argument with anything positive. Now they are pushing for a 2nd referendum with exactly the same game plan. Not a single serious Remain leader has asked why they lost and tried to work forward from there. It’s ridiculous.

I could fairly be accused of many things, but wanting to harm the UK is the least of them. I think Brexit is a difficult but important corrective for the country while fully understanding that many people disagree. But I hope it's an honest disagreement without an assumption of bad faith - on either side.

Thanks for the update. As discussed on here before the vote I felt one of the upsides of leaving would be the creative destruction wrought on our dominant political parties. Labour have ticked that box (spectacularly) and the Tories will follow in 5, 4, 3, 2.... Yes it was all good, thank you.