The Brexit Thread

[George C.]

This is excellent on the DUP.

Thanks for link, but 15 minutes of my life, I'll never get back.

They could have just summed this up in two words, 'irrational bigots'.

[Etienne]

Yeah, that was the reason that the ERG opposed May's deal, not that they gave a shit about N. Ireland, it was that it precluded their slash and burn deregulation dream.

[Satchmo Distel]

There's also the hypocrisy of how the rest of the UK will be slashed and burned but NI will have protection and rebates. It ought to make the Tories unelectable in any region about to be sent into massive recession while NI continues to be a net beneficiary.

[E10 Rifle]

Though you might quip that should Northern Ireland also "be tipped into a massive recession" would anyone notice much difference from the state of things there now?

[Snake Plissken]

Looks like the Sensibles don't want a General Election, but six-eight more months of this Government.

[URL]https://twitter.com/campbellclaret/status/1183407158010023937[/URL]

https://twitter.com/JolyonMaugham/status/1183336245407166465

[E10 Rifle]

That's a truly off-the-scale weird tweet from Maugham there. History will not be kind to it.

[ursus arctos]

Brexit has really brought out the essential weirdness in much of the British political and media class.

Maugham is very much not an exception.

[Diable Rouge]

Judging by the Commission's tweet, fair to say that if Johnson is seriously looking for a deal, it won't be ready by Thursday:

[URL="https://twitter.com/DanielFerrie/status/1183411987180670976"]https://twitter.com/DanielFerrie/sta...11987180670976[/URL]

[ursus arctos]

Well, Barnier specified that a Northern Ireland only backstop could be ready in that time frame, but that has been the case for a couple of years now.

[George C.]

Erm, there is no deal.

And unlikely to be.

Short of an extreme and unforeseen set of events.

[Nefertiti2]

[URL]https://twitter.com/jacobinmag/status/1183366778077896705?s=21[/URL]

[George C.]

Hmm, Britain has a 'liberal establishment'??

Not with any great power?

[Ginger Yellow]

With the latest leaks over the weekend, I do find it pretty grimly amusing that Johnson is essentially recapitulating the same process that May went through, just quicker. The first proposal was basically Max Fac. The leaked stuff is basically the Customs Partnership. They're not even trying to pretend to have new ideas, except maybe a bit more willingness to throw the DUP under the bus.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

That's a truly off-the-scale weird tweet from Maugham there. History will not be kind to it.

Yeah, but what are we supposed to make of the article it is attached to? Maybe we should focus less on making snippy comments about people looking for a referendum to avoid no deal, and rather more on the sort of person who doesn't want a referendum because it doesn't involve his stupid Labour Brexit deal that Literally no-body fucking wants, that no-body is interested in, will require labour to win an election that they look primed to finish third in, and puts off a referendum for even fucking longer.

If Maughan Threatened to murder corbyn with a screwdriver, I think most people would consider it proportionate response to that article.

[Snake Plissken]

Bollocks.

As is the article it is attached to. Somehow we're supposed to think that another six to eight months of this Government is Just Fine as long as there is a second referendum. As opposed to a General Election, which is likely to return the one party that has committed to a Remain vs Whatever Deal referendum and stops the Tories flamethrowering whatever is left of Britain.

Like I said, it looks like the Sensibles are beginning to realise that they've managed to get themselves - and not without help from the man himself - into a position where Corbyn is the most likely person to Stop Brexit and that can't be allowed to happen.

Edit: And a second referendum at that which is likely to be 55/45 Remain and will absolutely, definitely, unquestionably put the whole thing to bed.

[Etienne]

Everyone who wants a referendum now seems to forget the very real chance that the remain option could quite easily lose, against no deal, May's deal or Johnson's deal. Yes it's polling a few points ahead but so was remain for most of 2016. It seems to me quite sensible to pit remain against an option that nobody fucking wants.

[Snake Plissken]

The other thing is that in a referendum under a Tory minority, they get to set the rules. So the flagrant lying, dark money and all that bollocks that went on last time will simply happen again, this time with the Tories encouraging it.

But hey, that is beside the real point of waiting for a second ref, which is #NoCorbyns.

[Flynnie]

Excellent point. War criminals like Campbell just assume that everyone will "come to their senses" and vote Remain this time around now that they realise they were lied to. It's not a given at all. Britain is a deeply fractured nation now. How a second referendum or a general election will pan out is anybody's guess.

They might come to their senses, but will they with people like Campbell, Swinson and Spring: The Party!'s leader Jolyon Maugham leading the charge?

The official Remain campaign was shit and complacent last time and I've seen nowt in the way of change there.

[San Bernardhinault]

The official Remain campaign was shit and complacent last time and I've seen nowt in the way of change there.

Perhaps if Britain's main opposition party committed to remaining in the EU wholeheartedly - both last time and next time - that might have improved things in the last referendum, and taken the leadership out of the hands of people like Alistair Campbell; and will improve things in the future, taking the leadership out of the hands of people like Jolyon Maugham.

[Flynnie]

Not at all. Another problem with the Remain campaign is that none of its figureheads seems to realise how unpopular they are and suffer from delusions of grandeur. Wasn't it Maugham who planned to host a month-long festival celebrating each EU member state at a football ground at the end of which he would have announced his candidacy for Parliament?

Yes it was. That actually would have been quite fun in an embiggened school fete way over one weekend, imagine eating Lithuanian cookies at the Lithuanian stand and washing it down with a nice Swedish craft ale or whatever before attending a standup comedy duo from Walloon and Flanders who make jokes about Belgium (God, I'm nerdy). EPCOT meets Bestival. But Maugham seemed to actually think this would be Glastonbury for Remainers in terms of scale and change the conversation as it were.

If Maugham wants to change the conversation, I would do two things:

1) Stop alienating half (probably more than half, I think in a GE quite a bit of that Lib Dem vote bleeds away) the Remainer base who really, really want a Labour Government.

2) Actually...educate people about what the European Union does? It's amazing when you step into social media spaces or IRL conversations where somebody repeats Brexit talking points (sovereignty, EU is not democratic, they're holding us back, etc) and Remainers don't actually challenge those points but descend straight into mockery. OK, sometimes somebody says something too stupid to not mock, but the overall impression is this is a culture war with two sides as bad as each other, which feeds into the more-pernicious-than-accounted-for lump of people who just want Brexit over and done with so they can talk about something else. I saw somebody say they wanted a no-deal Brexit but to join EFTA, and pointed out the contradiction inherent in that without calling them a stupid gammon, and I'd like to think a light bulb went on there for someone. Maybe not him, but someone else.

Maugham is intelligent enough and has a big enough platform to, for example, actually explain how the ECJ works and dispel the myth it's some kind of secret anti-British court. For one thing, thanks to the UK and to a lesser extent Ireland, common law has an outsized presence on the court and its decisions considering we're but two of 27 because of the influence of British and Irish jurists.

[Flynnie]

Perhaps if Britain's main opposition party committed to remaining in the EU wholeheartedly - both last time and next time - that might have improved things in the last referendum, and taken the leadership out of the hands of people like Alistair Campbell; and will improve things in the future, taking the leadership out of the hands of people like Jolyon Maugham.

The media completely ignored Labour In last time and everything it did. They got the result they wanted.

[anton pulisov]

"a vast, impersonal, neoliberal monolith"

I see.

Or one of the world's largest trans-national democratic institutions, whose directives and laws accurately reflect the European electorate.

Sure, there's a lot of stuff that the EU does that I do not agree with. But that's not the fault of the EU, it's the fault of the European electorate.

[San Bernardhinault]

2) Actually...educate people about what the European Union does?

Absolutely. I wish everyone was doing this. Maugham, Swinson and Corbyn. None of them seem to be in the least interested in actually presenting the case of why the EU is fucking great in comparison to the alternative.

RC - I think: "7/10" is exactly not the kind of wholehearted support for remaining in the EU that might have actually led the public, but instead some half-arsed prevaricating fence-sitting, underwhelmingness that will result in the public and media thinking "Why should I bother with this?"

[Snake Plissken]

It's also worth remembering that Corbyn campaigned harder and more publicly than any other Labour MP, including the person who was in charge of Labour Remain - who I doubt most people on here could even name. What Corbyn was very careful to not do was continually appear next to Cameron, Osborne et al on the campaign trail - something that had had knock-on effects on Miliband and the Lib Dems during IndyRef and the 2015 elections respectively.

[Snake Plissken]

Well, that was why he was more visible on the campaign trail than any other Labour MP. As for effective, he delivered ~70% of Labour voters to Remain. I think that is about 5% less than the Lib Dems, and slightly more than the SNP. (I may have those the wrong way around.)