The now-enacted will of (some of) the people

[snowychap]

France in the United Kingdom Embassy of France in London

Quote

Prime Minister sets out no-deal Brexit contingency plans

The Prime Minister convened a meeting today of the ministers concerned with preparations for the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union. This meeting follows the rejection of the agreement on the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union by the House of Commons on 15 January 2019. France, even though it would still like to avoid the scenario, is preparing for the United Kingdom to leave with no deal on 30 March 2019, in consultation with the European Commission and its European Union partners.

The Prime Minister has therefore decided to implement the preparation plan he asked his ministers to draw up in April 2018, with the prospect of a possible no deal.

The act enabling the government to take measures by decree to prepare for the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union should be adopted on the final reading by Parliament today. It will enable five decrees to be taken which will be adopted at the Council of Ministers’ meeting, after the Conseil d’Etat (1) has delivered its opinion, as from 23 January 2019.

The first decree governs the rights of British citizens in France and inter alia provides for:

 a period of 12 months during which, subject to reciprocity, these British nationals will be able to continue living in France without a residence permit. They will therefore have one year to start the simplified process to automatically obtain either a residence card if they have lived in France for more than five years or to obtain one of the permits provided for those who have lived in the country for less than five years,

 keeping the social welfare rights these nationals were enjoying on the date of withdrawal,

 maintaining British companies established in France in regulated sectors (lawyers, chartered accountants),

 maintaining British civil servants within the French civil service.

A second decree will allow emergency infrastructure work necessary for restoring border checks (customs, sanitary and phytosanitary checks, checks on goods and people), by simplifying certain formalities.

A third decree will allow businesses established in the United Kingdom to continue road transport operations in France. It will also issue Eurotunnel with security clearance.

A fourth decree will allow certain financial activities, particularly as regards insurance, to continue following the loss of the United Kingdom’s financial passport.

A fifth decree will allow defence equipment transfers between France and the United Kingdom to continue.

All these contingency measures will be supplemented by European legislative acts, which are being drawn up.

The Prime Minister has decided to trigger the action plans of the ministries tasked with restoring border checks with the United Kingdom:

 infrastructure managers are asked to begin necessary work without delay (temporary constructions, especially for parking, at a cost of roughly €50 million) so that border checks are operational on 30 March 2019.

 the relevant ministers will have to train and appoint extra staff to carry out customs and veterinary checks (580 jobs), and concentrate them in the regions most affected.

These measures must step up the checks which will be necessary to protect the European single market, whilst keeping goods and people flowing as smoothly as possible.

...

These measures are envisaged only as contingency actions, which the government is responsible for preparing and which will continue as long as the British government has not put forward clear ideas for the United Kingdom’s orderly withdrawal from the European Union

more on link

 

Edited January 17, 2019 by snowychap

[tonyh29]

52 minutes ago, brommy said:

Yet it has also been reported that 22 weeks is the minimum but perfectly feasible timetable for organising another referendum.

22 weeks was the legal position according to some lawyer I heard on 5 live the other night    ...  was along the lines of

legislation would take 11 weeks ,a week for transition  and then a 10-week campaign.

 

which I guess equates to feasible timeline  , dunno ?

[ml1dch]

1 hour ago, snowychap said:

Don't think much of the Reservoir Dogs remake.

I dunno. Have you seen how many of the characters in Reservoir Dogs make it through to the end of the film?

(disclaimer - yes, I know that jokes about violence and MPs are obviously a terrible thing. And still shouldn't be made flippantly. But still.)

[fightoffyour]

At what point does a government look at the need to deploy armed troops in case its policy (or at least a possibility it won't rule out) comes to fruition and realise that this is not a sensible policy?

[chrisp65]

Had I been the Labour leader:

Give a speech about serious times needing serious compromise so I will meet with May and see how we can help.

Give a wave and a photo op on the door of No 10.

March out and tell the world she lied, there are still mad red lines, she just wanted us to agree with her, you can't reason with a robot.

Take the next day off, feet up, watching the newsfeeds and polls. 

[mjmooney]

Quote

The Malign Incompetence of the British Ruling Class

With Brexit, the chumocrats who drew borders from India to Ireland are getting a taste of their own medicine.

By Pankaj Mishra
Jan. 17, 2019

Describing Britain’s calamitous exit from its Indian empire in 1947, the novelist Paul Scott wrote that in India the British “came to the end of themselves as they were” — that is, to the end of their exalted idea about themselves. Scott was among those shocked by how hastily and ruthlessly the British, who had ruled India for more than a century, condemned it to fragmentation and anarchy; how Louis Mountbatten, accurately described by the right-wing historian Andrew Roberts as a “mendacious, intellectually limited hustler,” came to preside, as the last British viceroy of India, over the destiny of some 400 million people.

Britain’s rupture with the European Union is proving to be another act of moral dereliction by the country’s rulers. The Brexiteers, pursuing a fantasy of imperial-era strength and self-sufficiency, have repeatedly revealed their hubris, mulishness and ineptitude over the past two years. Though originally a “Remainer,” Prime Minister Theresa May has matched their arrogant obduracy, imposing a patently unworkable timetable of two years on Brexit and laying down red lines that undermined negotiations with Brussels and doomed her deal to resoundingly bipartisan rejection this week in Parliament.

Such a pattern of egotistic and destructive behavior by the British elite flabbergasts many people today. But it was already manifest seven decades ago during Britain’s rash exit from India.

Mountbatten, derided as “Master of Disaster” in British naval circles, was a representative member of a small group of upper- and middle-class British men from which the imperial masters of Asia and Africa were recruited. Abysmally equipped for their immense responsibilities, they were nevertheless allowed by Britain’s brute imperial power to blunder through the world — a “world of whose richness and subtlety,” as E.M. Forster wrote in “Notes on the English Character,” they could “have no conception.”

Forster blamed Britain’s political fiascos on its privately educated men, callow beneficiaries of the country’s elitist public school system. These eternal schoolboys whose “weight is out of all proportion” to their numbers are certainly overrepresented among Tories. They have today plunged Britain into its worst crisis, exposing its incestuous and self-serving ruling class like never before.

From David Cameron, who recklessly gambled his country’s future on a referendum in order to isolate some whingers in his Conservative party, to the opportunistic Boris Johnson, who jumped on the Brexit bandwagon to secure the prime ministerial chair once warmed by his role model Winston Churchill, and the top-hatted, theatrically retro Jacob Rees-Mogg, whose fund management company has set up an office within the European Union even as he vehemently scorns it, the British political class has offered to the world an astounding spectacle of mendacious, intellectually limited hustlers.

Even a columnist for The Economist, an organ of the British elite, now professes dismay over “Oxford chums” who coast through life on “bluff rather than expertise.” “Britain,” the magazine belatedly lamented last month, “is governed by a self-involved clique that rewards group membership above competence and self-confidence above expertise.” In Brexit, the British “chumocracy,” the column declared, “has finally met its Waterloo.”

It is actually more accurate, for those invoking British history, to say that partition — the British Empire’s ruinous exit strategy — has come home. In a grotesque irony, borders imposed in 1921 on Ireland, England’s first colony, have proved to be the biggest stumbling block for the English Brexiteers chasing imperial virility. Moreover, Britain itself faces the prospect of partition if Brexit, a primarily English demand, is achieved and Scottish nationalists renew their call for independence.

It is a measure of English Brexiteers’ political acumen that they were initially oblivious to the volatile Irish question and contemptuous of the Scottish one. Ireland was cynically partitioned to ensure that Protestant settlers outnumber native Catholics in one part of the country. The division provoked decades of violence and consumed thousands of lives. It was partly healed in 1998, when a peace agreement removed the need for security checks along the British-imposed partition line.

The re-imposition of a customs and immigration regime along Britain’s only land border with the European Union was always likely to be resisted with violence. But Brexiteers, awakening late to this ominous possibility, have tried to deny it. A leaked recording revealed Mr. Johnson scorning concerns about the border as “pure millennium bug stuff.”

Politicians and journalists in Ireland are understandably aghast over the aggressive ignorance of English Brexiteers. Business people everywhere are outraged by their cavalier disregard for the economic consequences of new borders. But none of this would surprise anyone who knows of the unconscionable breeziness with which the British ruling class first drew lines through Asia and Africa and then doomed the people living across them to endless suffering.

The malign incompetence of the Brexiteers was precisely prefigured during Britain’s exit from India in 1947, most strikingly in the lack of orderly preparation for it. The British government had announced that India would have independence by June 1948. In the first week of June 1947, however, Mountbatten suddenly proclaimed that the transfer of power would happen on Aug. 15, 1947 — a “ludicrously early date,” as he himself blurted out. In July, a British lawyer named Cyril Radcliffe was entrusted with the task of drawing new boundaries of a country he had never previously visited.

Given only around five weeks to invent the political geography of an India flanked by an eastern and a western wing called Pakistan, Radcliffe failed to visit any villages, communities, rivers or forests along the border he planned to demarcate. Dividing agricultural hinterlands from port cities, and abruptly reducing Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs on either side of the new border to a religious minority, Radcliffe delivered a plan for partition that effectively sentenced millions to death or desolation while bringing him the highest-ranked knighthood.

Up to one million people died, countless women were abducted and raped, and the world’s largest refugee population was created during the population transfers across Radcliffe’s border — an extensive carnage that exceeds all apocalyptic scenarios of Brexit.

In retrospect, Mountbatten had even less reason than Mrs. May to speed up the exit clock — and create insoluble and eternal problems. Just a few months after the botched partition, for instance, India and Pakistan were fighting a war over the disputed territory of Kashmir. None of the concerned parties were pushing for a hasty British exit. As the historian Alex von Tunzelmann points out, “the rush was Mountbatten’s, and his alone.”

Mountbatten was actually less pigheaded than Winston Churchill, whose invocation stiffens the spines of many Brexiteers today. Churchill, a fanatical imperialist, worked harder than any British politician to thwart Indian independence and, as prime minister from 1940 to 1945, did much to compromise it. Seized by a racist fantasy about superior Anglo-Americans, he refused to help Indians cope with famine in 1943 on the grounds that they “breed like rabbits.”

Needless to say, such ravings issued from an ignorance about India as intractable as that of the Brexiteers about Ireland. Churchill’s own secretary of state for India claimed that his boss knew “as much of the Indian problem as George III did of the American colonies.” Churchill displayed in his long career a similarly imperial insouciance toward Ireland, sending countless young Irishmen to their deaths in a catastrophic military fiasco at Gallipoli, Turkey, during World War I and unleashing brutal paramilitaries against Irish nationalists in 1920.

The many crimes of the empire’s bumptious adventurers were enabled by Britain’s great geopolitical power and then obscured by its cultural prestige. This is why images cherished by the British elite of itself as valiant, wise and benevolent could survive, until recently, much damning historical evidence about these masters of disaster from Cyprus to Malaysia, Palestine to South Africa. In recent years, such privately educated and smooth-tongued men as Niall Ferguson and Tony Blair could even present the British as saviors of suffering and benighted humanity, urging American neoconservatives to take up the white man’s burden globally.

Humiliations in neo-imperialist ventures abroad, followed by the rolling calamity of Brexit at home, have cruelly exposed the bluff of what Hannah Arendt called the “quixotic fools of imperialism.” As partition comes home, threatening bloodshed in Ireland and secession in Scotland, and an unimaginable chaos of no-deal Brexit looms, ordinary British people stand to suffer from the untreatable exit wounds once inflicted by Britain’s bumbling chumocrats on millions of Asians and Africans. More ugly historical ironies may yet waylay Britain on its treacherous road to Brexit. But it is safe to say that a long-cossetted British ruling class has finally come to the end of itself as it was.

Pankaj Mishra is the author, most recently, of “Age of Anger: A History of the Present.”
 

NYT

[LondonLax]

1 hour ago, chrisp65 said:

Had I been the Labour leader:

Give a speech about serious times needing serious compromise so I will meet with May and see how we can help.

Give a wave and a photo op on the door of No 10.

March out and tell the world she lied, there are still mad red lines, she just wanted us to agree with her, you can't reason with a robot.

Take the next day off, feet up, watching the newsfeeds and polls. 

Exactly, a bizarre missed opportunity to keep the pressure on May. Instead he’s the one looking useless again. 

[HanoiVillan]

 

[hippo]

12 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

Had I been the Labour leader:

Give a speech about serious times needing serious compromise so I will meet with May and see how we can help.

Give a wave and a photo op on the door of No 10.

March out and tell the world she lied, there are still mad red lines, she just wanted us to agree with her, you can't reason with a robot.

Take the next day off, feet up, watching the newsfeeds and polls. 

The government of the day passes legislation and has a responsibility to get things done - thats the job of the government not the opposition. 

 

Edited January 18, 2019 by hippo

[snowychap]

11 minutes ago, hippo said:

The government of the day passes legislation and has a responsibility to get things done - thats the job of the government not the opposition.

The government brings forward legislation.

It is Parliament that passes (or doesn't pass) legislation. Parliament has a responsibility to sort out issues that may have arisen from legislation that it has already passed, i.e. the Withdrawal Act.

[HanoiVillan]

I'm not saying Corbyn is beyond criticism on this, but I do think the difference between 'attend a meeting at Number 10 and walk out five minutes later saying it's bullshit' and 'say it's bullshit without attending the meeting' is less enormous than seems to be being made out. 

[hippo]

38 minutes ago, snowychap said:

The government brings forward legislation.

It is Parliament that passes (or doesn't pass) legislation. Parliament has a responsibility to sort out issues that may have arisen from legislation that it has already passed, i.e. the Withdrawal Act.

OK - but blaming the opposition for not passing the legislation to me is a sign of desperation. What are they supposed to do just roll over ?  

We are where we are because of a few noisy right wingers in the Tory party. David Camerons attempt to shut them up was the referendum - there was an option on the ballot paper that wasn't deliverable - to lump all that on the opposition party voting against 

[villa4europe]

this is going to make my day

 

[snowychap]

3 minutes ago, hippo said:

OK - but blaming the opposition for not passing the legislation to me is a sign of desperation. What are they supposed to do just roll over ?  

We are where we are because of a few noisy right wingers in the Tory party. David Camerons attempt to shut them up was the referendum - there was an option on the ballot paper that wasn't deliverable - to lump all that on the opposition party voting against 

I'm not 'blaming the opposition for not passing the legislation'. I have no idea what you're on about when you talk about 'just rolling over'.

I'm very much saying the oppposite. I'm saying that the Opposition (and all opposition parties) ought to be making sure that they at least try to have some input as to how we proceed.

It doesn't matter why we are where we are (at least in terms of addressing the identified problems), it only matters that we are where we are and that we try to get out of it.

You're really getting the wrong end of the stick if you think criticism of Corbyn and/or Labour is 'lumping all that on the oppposition party'.

Corbyn can be criticized at the same time as criticism is levelled at May and Johnson and Farridge and Banks and Sturgeon and so on.

[snowychap]

1 hour ago, HanoiVillan said:

I'm not saying Corbyn is beyond criticism on this, but I do think the difference between 'attend a meeting at Number 10 and walk out five minutes later saying it's bullshit' and 'say it's bullshit without attending the meeting' is less enormous than seems to be being made out. 

There is a fundamental difference between engaging in a process and having it confirmed that it will be futile by the actions of others and deciding that you're going to take an action that will ensure that the process is futile regardless of the actions of others.

There is a difference between making yourself a bystander and being made one.

Who gives a shit about how 'enormous' it is? It's a waste of time discussing the magnitude of difference.

Indeed, it's a waste of time discussing Corbyn at the moment, in my book. He's taken the step of sidelining himself for now so we should concentrate upon discussing what else is actually happening - which would include criticizing the PM for appearing to hardly budge an inch, for example.

 

Edited January 18, 2019 by snowychap

[tonyh29]

following on from the woman who wont resign  whilst telling MP's to put self-interest aside   ,  we now have the man who met with the likes of Hamas and the IRA without preconditions in order  to encourage dialogue between "all sides"   .. refusing to meet with UK government

 

[desensitized43]

14 minutes ago, tonyh29 said:

following on from the woman who wont resign  whilst telling MP's to put self-interest aside   ,  we now have the man who met with the likes of Hamas and the IRA without preconditions in order  to encourage dialogue between "all sides"   .. refusing to meet with UK government

 

I agree he needs to have some kind of dialogue especially when one is offered but I think this is far too late now. She needed to do this right after the election disaster because it was obvious she would need some support from the labour benches to get anything through. Doing it at this late stage strikes me as an attempt to shift some of the blame to the labour side "look, I tried to deliver something but the opposition wouldn't back it so it's their fault you can't get your medicines, your house is worth less than you paid for it and your company is shifting production to Lithuania". It's a game, a stunt by the government, but by not at least being seen to want to talk he's reinforcing a narrative that will play very nicely to a certain crowd who will be looking for someone to blame for the shitshow we might be about to see.

[magnkarl]

1 hour ago, hippo said:

OK - but blaming the opposition for not passing the legislation to me is a sign of desperation. What are they supposed to do just roll over ?  

We are where we are because of a few noisy right wingers in the Tory party. David Camerons attempt to shut them up was the referendum - there was an option on the ballot paper that wasn't deliverable - to lump all that on the opposition party voting against 

Have you forgotten that JC is a brexiteer too? His half-arsed attempt at "campaigning" for us to stay in the EU was a shamble.

Both our leading parties are as effective as slinging mud in a gunfight, end of.

Edited January 18, 2019 by magnkarl

[tonyh29]

7 minutes ago, desensitized43 said:

I agree he needs to have some kind of dialogue especially when one is offered but I think this is far too late now. She needed to do this right after the election disaster because it was obvious she would need some support from the labour benches to get anything through. Doing it at this late stage strikes me as an attempt to shift some of the blame to the labour side "look, I tried to deliver something but the opposition wouldn't back it so it's their fault you can't get your medicines, your house is worth less than you paid for it and your company is shifting production to Lithuania". It's a game, a stunt by the government, but by not at least being seen to want to talk he's reinforcing a narrative that will play very nicely to a certain crowd who will be looking for someone to blame for the shitshow we might be about to see.

I agree  , I've said before the whole Brexit thing should have been cross party ( excluding the SNP of course )

 

I don't agree with the Lithuania line simply as businesses move all the time for non Brexit reasons ,JLR last week being a prime example .. but Brexit will be an convenient scapegoat for every bit of bad news   ( will play very nicely to a certain crowd who will be looking for something to blame  )

[desensitized43]

4 minutes ago, tonyh29 said:

I agree  , I've said before the whole Brexit thing should have been cross party ( excluding the SNP of course )

 

I don't agree with the Lithuania line simply as businesses move all the time for non Brexit reasons ,JLR last week being a prime example .. but Brexit will be an convenient scapegoat for every bit of bad news   ( will play very nicely to a certain crowd who will be looking for something to blame  )

9

Fair point. I think there's been evidence out there (not that I can directly cite it now as I'm supposed to be working !) that international investment in the UK dropped markedly as a result of the current situation.