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

[Demitri_C]

Just now, chrisp65 said:

What more is there than that?

 Negotiating deals with other countries is not exactly admin work?

[chrisp65]

Just now, Demitri_C said:

 Negotiating deals with other countries is not exactly admin work?

It is, it is the very definition of the word administration.

 

I didn't mean stapling and lining up all the pens.

[HanoiVillan]

Well, I mean, there's really quite a lot of political balls to juggle as well, isn't there?

[chrisp65]

[Xann]

[Amsterdam_Neil_D]

2 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

It is, it is the very definition of the word administration.

 

I didn't mean stapling and lining up all the pens.

 

2 hours ago, Demitri_C said:

 Negotiating deals with other countries is not exactly admin work?

There are at the start a clear set of objectives and tasks to be completed as with any large project.

Many industries attempt and complete large complex objectives with negotiations and other items such safety.  (EG Channel tunnel,  or a new nuclear power plant or an offshore oil platform or underground pipes etc.)

We have probabley helped in some of these in jobs on VT.

It should be within the abilities of these people,  it isn't and they know it.  I think they know we know as well.

 

[Demitri_C]

Just now, Amsterdam_Neil_D said:

 

There are at the start a clear set of objectives and tasks to be completed as with any large project.

Many industries attempt and complete large complex objectives with negotiations and other items such safety.  (EG Channel tunnel,  or a new nuclear power plant or an offshore oil platform or underground pipes etc.)

We have probabley helped in some of these in jobs on VT.

It should be within the abilities of these people,  it isn't and they know it.  I think they know we know as well.

 

100% agree. They are incapable of delivering something so big. I think business leaders would do better than these clowns.

[Chindie]

In fairness, and to quote DAG, Brexit doesn't need to be 'delivered'. The entirety of everyone involved in the discussions could do absolutely nothing and Brexit happens just through the process begun with the A50 invocation (that was cheered on by morons).

It'd be a **** disaster, but it is what it is. 

As it is it's still fairly likely we'll get that outcome anyway, but we'll have spent 2 years spinning our wheels and watching the Tories have a car crash in slow motion to get there, because we seem incapable of accepting that we're leaving a club with rules and want back in without accepting the rules we don't like, which shockingly the club is telling us isn't going to happen.

[bickster]

I think this article, by Nick Cohen in The Guardian / Observer just about sums up the current peril we are in, the analogies are spot on.

Quote

It is dangerous to assume the past is superior to the present. After going back through all the crises since the end of the Second World War, however, I cannot find a time when Britain was so out of options and so out of luck. By “options”, I don’t mean escape routes liberal readers of the Observer would welcome, just alternatives that seemed plausible at the time.

Suez? Get the troops out of Egypt. Union militancy? Thatcher. The degradation of the public realm? New Labour. The crash of 2008? Austerity. There was always an escape, however unpalatable. Now, to steal William Hague’s description of the eurozone crisis, Brexit Britain is a burning building with no exits. The alarms ring but no rescuers come.

If you try to understand as well as condemn the architects of Brexit, you see at once that their hopes are in pieces. The strategic basis for Brexit was that Britain would cut its ties with its European allies and set out across the oceans to create a new alliance with America. They believed that some as yet undiscovered hereditary principle guaranteed that the Anglosphere – the white Commonwealth plus America – promoted free trade and prosperity.

In vain did their opponents argue that our trade with the EU vastly exceeded our trade with the US and that a strong America would turn on a weak Britain and force it to accept chlorinated chicken and the privatisation of NHS services. Tories of all people were meant to know that life wasn’t fair, we said. The classically educated among them ought to have learned Thucydides’s warning that in international affairs, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”. Trump was an America First protectionist who no more believed in free trade than he supported the #MeToo movement.

We have been vindicated on every point. The Trump visit ought to be a moment of national awakening. Instead, it has been a national humiliation. A government and an opposition with an ounce of self-respect would have responded to Trump’s ultimatum that he would not allow a trade deal unless we delivered the Brexit he wanted by reassessing our decision to leave the EU. A Conservative party that still respected itself and the country would have revolted at the impertinence of the leader of an increasingly hostile foreign power telling them to see Boris Johnson as “a great prime minister”.

Instead, Theresa May’s government allowed the special relationship to become an abusive relationship. Like a battered wife lying to the police, it pretended that Trump had not insulted May and that a trade deal would go ahead and then waited for a pathological liar to lie that he had never said what he had said, on the record and on tape.

A second defeat is worth noting. To its proponents, Brexit was never meant to threaten Britain’s security. By last week, it was clear that Trump’s America, on which the Tory right has gambled our futures, is a clear and present danger to Nato. With a wonderful serendipity, as Trump was meeting the Queen, the US Department of Justice indicted 12 alleged Russian spies for helping Trump to power. We already know that Russia wanted Trump because he was against Nato and because, in all his foul harangues, has never once uttered a bad word about Putin.

At the parochial level, the Tories ought to be terrified. They want to attack Jeremy Corbyn for being against Nato and in favour of anti-western dictatorial regimes. But Brexit is tying the Tories in general and Johnson and the Tory right in particular to a US president who is against Nato and in favour of anti-western dictatorial regimes.

Step back from local politics and the global picture looks worse. “The west” is based on the American military guarantee to Nato. If Trump and Putin weaken or abolish it, the west would have to be rebuilt, assuming that it survives at all. A confident government would look around and suspend or cancel Brexit, because this was not the time to tear up Britain’s alliances with Paris and Berlin.

Politicians across parliament know it but dare not say it. The referendum result prevents them from speaking out, as it prevents them from even having a Mueller-style inquiry into Russian interference in our referendum. You could almost burst out laughing.Brexit was meant to have been about taking back control; instead, it has produced a country in the grip of an uncontrollable neurosis.

All the symptoms are there. No one – not Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson, Theresa May or Jeremy Corbyn – can tell the public the truth that we either stay so closely aligned to the EU that there is no point in leaving or we suffer a shuddering economic shock and a catastrophic fall in our global standing .

Like the First World War generals who thought their men could pierce impregnable defences, if only they threw themselves at them with enough elan, the Tory right pretends we could have our cake and eat it if only we spoke louder. Trump would know how to deal with the EU, an admiring Johnson cried: “He’d go in bloody hard.” The bloody hard strategy is calling the EU’s bluff by preparing for a no-deal Brexit. As the EU knows, no deal would cause chaos; the threat has all the conviction of a man pulling a gun in a bank and shouting: “Give me the money or I’ll shoot myself in the heart.”

Last, but not least, is the paralysis that accompanies advanced neurosis. Quite possibly, there is no majority in parliament not just for no deal or May’s deal (whatever that is) but for any deal and we will slip into chaos for want of an alternative.

The rightwing press accuses supporters of the EU of thinking the 17.4 million who voted Leave are stupid. I don’t, but I do think the 2016 referendum was stupid – cretinously so to the point of idiocy. With unforgivable cynicism, Vote Leave refused to explain what Brexit would entail for fear of weakening its cause. Unlike the Irish government before the abortion referendum, the Cameron government did not spell out what Brexit would mean. We’re working out the meaning of Brexit after rather than before the referendum.

I still believe in the common sense of most (if not all) of my fellow citizens. Their tragedy is that by the time understanding dawns they will find that they have voted to lock themselves in a burning building and to throw away the key.

• Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist

 

4

 

[ml1dch]

Something that I only just twigged - Chris Heaton-Harris, the bloke who has replaced that quarter-wit Steve Baker at DexEU is that plum who wrote to to all the universities last year and demanded they send him all their course material on Brexit. For that Pete Townshend-style "book" he was writing.

It really comes to something when you're replacing Steve Baker, and somehow you end up with someone who is even more of a nitwit.

[bickster]

If you've got 2 spare hours this might be worth your time

 

[bickster]

Justine Greening, calling for a second referendum.

[bickster]

My thoughts on the Chequers proposal. (why its being called a deal is beyond me)

This country has predominantly been a service industry ever since Thatcher. The proposal takes services out of the EU but puts goods back in. Why?

They HAVE to have goods back in because without that the country would suffer food shortages, there are no stockpiles of food in the country. The longest estimate of how long the food would last is 21 days but most think its about 2 weeks.

But this country earns most money from services (its about 80% of GDP) and the government have to leave with at least one of them so we're going to drive 80% of the economy over the cliff so the people can at least eat. Thats the curent deal in a nutshell I think. Just shows how mad the whole idea is

 

[chrisp65]

Great.

Just as I need to build a wall around my allotment, all the east europeans are going home.

[ml1dch]

In other news, it sounds like all of the Rees-Mogg amendments are going to be unchallenged by the Government.

Given that one of those is that there will be no Irish Sea border, we will thus have written into law:

1. That we are leaving the structures that mean we don't need a border (in the customs and standards sense of the word)

2. That there can't be a border on the island of Ireland.

3. That there can't be a border between Great Britain and Ireland.

So we're basically writing into law that black is white and up is down.

[VILLAMARV]

Quote

“Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men, generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to put out its faults, and do better than it would have them?" - Thoreau

1849 that, and yet I feel so relevant to our times.

[NurembergVillan]

[Chindie]

There won't be another referendum without an extension on Article 50.

I don't think a second referendum is a good idea. Referendums are bad, for a start. Then, the question might be even more complex this time.

And then all the same problems that made the first referendum such a cluster **** still exist, if not more so. People are still ignorant, the media is still laughable in educating the electorate (and a number have to one degree or another have enjoyed pushing the line that all this is caused by the EU trying to screw us). I'd stake good money Leave wins still, even if the option on the table is taking the shittiest option going, no deal (which increasingly we're going to get anyway).

We don't need another referendum. We need some politicians with some bollocks.

[Amsterdam_Neil_D]

28 minutes ago, Chindie said:

I don't think a second referendum is a good idea.

100 % agree,  the way things have gone recently I would not be suprised iat all if the Leave vote actually increases.

 

[Stevo985]

14 minutes ago, Amsterdam_Neil_D said:

100 % agree,  the way things have gone recently I would not be suprised iat all if the Leave vote actually increases.

 

Yep, my gut feeling is the same.

Which is mental.

I've said before that I could understand a leave vote at the time. I didn't agree with it, not by a long shot, but I could see reasons why people would vote Leave (some good reasons, some bad reasons, but reasons nonetheless)

But now, I honestly don't understand how people can still think it's a good idea other than total ignorance. If anyone on here still thinks Leave is the right thing to do I'd be genuinely interested in their logic.