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

[peterms]

1 hour ago, Amsterdam_Neil_D said:

Do the UK still pay Money in to the EU & can the UK do it's trade deals are 2 things I cannot find out at the moment.

I have been up for ages as I expected resignations but none so far.

The figure of £39bn has been mentioned several times.

We can't do independent trade deals while remaining in the customs union.  The point Vara made in resigning is that there is no unilateral way out of the customs union under this deal.

But that's probably a good thing.  Imagine this level of negotiating expertise being brought to bear on doing new deals with lots of other countries, starting from a position of weakness and panic.

[hippo]

12 hours ago, OutByEaster? said:

Have we now got the three options again then?

This deal, no deal or no Brexit?

 

 

If Parliament doesn't back it - the short term choices are:-

• Hard Brexit (no deal)
• General Election
• 2nd Referendum

 

[Chindie]

Idiot that didn't realise an island might be very reliant on a port close its biggest trading partner, has gone.

[peterms]

Raab has gone, reportedly because of the indefinite basis of the arrangements in the deal.

[hippo]

3 minutes ago, peterms said:

Raab has gone, reportedly because of the indefinite basis of the arrangements in the deal.

Hard Brexit here we come ?  -  Don't see how May can survive now.

[snowychap]

4 minutes ago, peterms said:

Raab has gone

Ha ha ha ha.

No sense of the dramatic, though. Could definitely have done some sort of Heseltine yesterday.

[peterms]

Just now, hippo said:

Hard Brexit here we come ?  -  Don't see how May can survive now.

Of your 3 possibilities above, a second referendum doesn't actually change the situation in itself - it gives political space to make changes.  The change would be revoking A50, and to do that, a change of PM (and probably of government) would be needed.

There is then the question of whether it can be revoked unilaterally, or only by agreement among the 27.

[Chindie]

Particularly funny to note that Raab has effectively resigned over a deal he was (officially) responsible for negotiating.

[bickster]

6 minutes ago, peterms said:

Of your 3 possibilities above, a second referendum doesn't actually change the situation in itself - it gives political space to make changes.  The change would be revoking A50, and to do that, a change of PM (and probably of government) would be needed.

There is then the question of whether it can be revoked unilaterally, or only by agreement among the 27.

It's pretty much acknowledged that it can be revoked unilaterally, the bloke that wrote article 50 as good as said so. Can't be bothered to trawl back for his name and a link, it's in this thread somewhere (unless it got Blandied). The whole court case is merely a test as its never been done before, hence the governments stance to challenge at every step of the way

[Rodders]

Quote

In the last few minutes, since news broke of Dominic Raab’s resignation, the pound has fallen sharply ... down more than 1% against the euro and the dollar - a big move. Against the euro it is now 1.1382 and against the dollar $1.2873. It was over $1.30 first thing this morning.

Bought my euros for a holiday next week two days ago, thank christ.

[peterms]

1 minute ago, bickster said:

It's pretty much acknowledged that it can be revoked unilaterally, the bloke that wrote article 50 as good as said so. Can't be bothered to trawl back for his name and a link, it's in this thread somewhere (unless it got Blandied)

It's not, hence the need for the legal action to seek a definitive view.

The view of the author is interesting, but not definitive, and carries no more weight than your view or mine.

[Amsterdam_Neil_D]

7 minutes ago, Rodders said:

the euro it is now 1.1382

What's the lowest possible for this now,  1 to 1 a possiblility ?

[ml1dch]

8 minutes ago, Rodders said:

Bought my euros for a holiday next week two days ago, thank christ.

Did mine yesterday for a trip away next weekend on the assumption something like this would happen.

[snowychap]

[StefanAVFC]

I have zero money in pounds right now. It feels pretty good.

[snowychap]

33 minutes ago, peterms said:

Raab has gone

Going back to this, if he has resigned because he can't support the deal then was he only holding on because he hoped that the cabinet would reject it yesterday?

Surely, he knew what was in it before the meeting?

[hippo]

3 minutes ago, snowychap said:

Going back to this, if he has resigned because he can't support the deal then was he only holding on because he hoped that the cabinet would reject it yesterday?

Surely, he knew what was in it before the meeting?

Big decision - he probably just slept on it.

[snowychap]

Just now, hippo said:

Big decision - he probably just slept on it.

I very much doubt it.

He just resigned because he can't accept the deal that he himself and his department were supposedly responsible for negotiating.

He either didn't actually know what was in it before he turned up to cabinet (very unlikely however little we might think of him), thought and hoped that the cabinet wouldn't support the deal and was dissapointed on this (again, I think he'd have gone yesterday if it were just that), ior he has spent most of the night taking soundings from his fellow hard brexiteerists as to what they demanded he do in order to cause issues for May, like resigning 90 minutes before she is due to give her statement.

It will be interesting to see if more resignations come in between now and half ten (or perhaps even during her statement).

 

[snowychap]

Fintan O’Toole: Historians will not believe sheer ignorance of Brexit supporters

Quote

 

When future historians try to understand how Britain ended up with a choice between chaos and becoming a satellite of the European Union, one question will stump them. Were these people telling deliberate lies or were they merely staggeringly ignorant? Where does mendacity stop and idiocy begin? Historians generally have to assume that people in power have a basic grasp of what they are doing, that their actions are intentional. They may use deception as a tactic and they may be deluded in what they think they can achieve. But they must, at least at the beginning, have some grasp on reality – otherwise they would not have achieved power. Yet, for the poor historians trying to make sense of Brexit, this assumption will be mistaken.

 There is, of course, plenty of straightforward mendacity for them to identify. Boris Johnson’s whole journalistic and political career has been driven by his talent for taking minor regulations and distorting them into wildly exaggerated claims of oppression by the Eurocrats. This can’t be done by mistake. For example, you cannot by accident take, as Johnson did, a Council of Europe (not EU) convention on the repatriation of corpses and turn it into a repeated claim that “There really is European legislation on the weight, dimensions and composition of a coffin”. There isn’t. This is not ignorance – it is a knowing falsification of the truth. So let’s leave that aside. Historians will know it when they see it.

A spotter’s guide

 Their problem will be, rather, with the shades of obliviousness. Here our future scholars will have to try to distinguish between three kinds of ignorance: deliberate unknowing, crass self-delusion and what we can only call pig ignorance. So, for their benefit, here is a brief spotter’s guide.

 Deliberate unknowing is when you are fully aware of something but then choose to suppress that consciousness. A good example is Theresa May speaking about the Irish border on June 21st 2016, just two days before the referendum: “Just think about it. If we are out of the European Union with tariffs on exporting goods into the EU, there’d have to be something to recognise that, between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. And if you pulled out of the EU and came out of free movement, then how could you have a situation where there was an open border with a country that was in the EU and has access to free movement?” So she knew full well that a Brexit that involved leaving the customs union would create a hard border. And then, as prime minister, she insisted on the opposite: that a hard Brexit was perfectly compatible with no return of a hard border. She unknew what she had known.

 Crass self-delusion is when you start with an ideological premise that you believe to be true even though it isn’t and then draw apparently reasonable conclusions from it.

Thus, for example, David Davis sincerely believed the EU is just a front for German domination of Europe. Hence he also believed quite genuinely that the Brexit negotiations would be conducted not with Brussels but over a convivial weissbräu and schnitzel in Berlin and that frictionless trade would be decreed immediately because the German car manufacturers wished it so: sincerely fatuous self-delusion.

Village idiot

 And then there’s pig ignorance – the genuine hallmarked, unadulterated, slack-jawed, open-mouthed, village idiot variety in which the people who are in charge of the British state don’t know stuff that anyone off Gogglebox could tell them. The Brexiteer MP Nadine Dorries admitted in effect that she didn’t know what a customs union is. Her comrade Andrew Bridgen said last month: “As an English person, I do have the right to go over to Ireland and I believe that I can ask for a passport. Can’t I?” 

 Karen Bradley, the actual secretary of state for Northern Ireland, said:“I freely admit that when I started this job, I didn’t understand some of the deep-seated and deep-rooted issues that there are in Northern Ireland. I didn’t understand things like when elections are fought, for example, in Northern Ireland – people who are nationalists don’t vote for unionist parties and vice versa.”

 And last week the actual Brexit secretary, Dominic Raab: “I hadn’t quite understood the full extent of this, but if you look at the UK and look at how we trade in goods, we are particularly reliant on the Dover-Calais crossing.”

Crass self-delusion

 What’s charming about this is that Bradley and Raab’s ignorance is publicly self-proclaimed. It’s not just that they didn’t know basic stuff, it’s that they didn’t think there was anything shameful in not knowing. This is the purest form of ignorance: it’s not just that you don’t know, but that you don’t even know that you’re meant to know. 

 Historians will in time get to the bottom of the deliberate unknowing and the crass self-delusion. They can be charted. But this pure pig ignorance, innocent and unalloyed, is unfathomable. It will be impossible not to conclude that it was all part of some great strategic plan, that, if only we could plumb its depths, we could reveal the hidden truth of Brexit. How will they ever believe that the hidden truth is so asinine?

 

 

[ml1dch]

22 minutes ago, StefanAVFC said:

I have zero money in pounds right now. It feels pretty good.

That's not much less than lots of people who only have money in pounds will soon have.