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    Originally posted by Diable Rouge View Post
    Intriguing GFA motion by Lady Hermon:

    https://publications.parliament.uk/p..._1205.1-7.html
    Apparently vote's due in next few minutes.

    Comment


      Davis and the DUP have distracted from that.
      I don't think the DUP wranglings are a 'distraction' issue. I can't think of anything more important in this whole saga than the Irish border one. My position is basically, 'pro-anything that stops a hard border returning'

      Comment


        I'm assuming a deal won't bring a hard border. I can't see how the EU will accept anything that does.

        Comment


          Which means staying in the customs union.

          Comment


            Maybe Moggy, Foxy and all the other crazies will encase themselves in concrete and blow up the road between Belcoo and Blacklion...

            Comment


              Originally posted by E10 Rifle View Post
              Which means staying in the customs union.
              Yep.

              The main people stopping us from it are Tories, rather than the DUP.

              Comment


                Chuka Umunna has written to the Speaker about Davis:

                https://mobile.twitter.com/bbclaurak...85564420100098

                Comment


                  Leo's now expecting an amended text "tonight or tomorrow".

                  Comment


                    I’m tugging off in frenzied anticipation.

                    Comment


                      New Irish Times poll proves that a spat with "perfidious Albion" is always a vote-winner:

                      Fine Gael 36% (+5)
                      Fianna Fáil 25% (-4)
                      Sinn Féin 19% (-)
                      Ind/Oth 16% (-1)
                      Lab 4% (-)

                      Comment


                        There's an image I'm taking to bed...

                        Comment


                          Something that occurs to me is that if David Davies believes that the formula of words that was going to do the magic with the North, was going to apply to the whole of the UK, I can't help feeling that either he has a very different concept of what those words mean, or the UK isn't going to leave the single market.

                          Comment


                            20 Tory MPs (mostly the ones the Telegraph had a pop at) have written to May telling her not to let the Brexiters fuck with her negotiations.

                            Comment


                              Originally posted by The Awesome Berbaslug!!! View Post
                              Something that occurs to me is that if David Davies believes that the formula of words that was going to do the magic with the North, was going to apply to the whole of the UK, I can't help feeling that either he has a very different concept of what those words mean, or the UK isn't going to leave the single market.
                              The words were just a diplomatic bridge to a trade deal in which we'd have the benefits of the single market without being in it, through some sort of regulatory equivalence regime. At which point the border issue would fall away. In his mind, anyway.

                              Comment


                                NI pollsters Lucid Talk have released their latest survey:

                                58% want NI to remain in the single market.
                                48% would vote for a united Ireland in the event of a hard Border.
                                52% believe rights will be reduced after Brexit.
                                75% want EU standards to be maintained.

                                Comment


                                  Comment in The Financial Times




                                  Three obvious lessons can be drawn from proceedings so far. The first is that the fundamental asymmetry has emptied of all meaning any description of the process as a balanced negotiation. This too was clear from the outset. The cost of failure is proportionately much higher for Britain than for the other side. That puts power in the hands of the EU27. Even Boris Johnson, Britain’s “go-whistle” foreign secretary, must have understood by now that Italy’s exports of prosecco to the UK are not Britain’s secret weapon.

                                  The second lesson is that after decades of membership, politicians at Westminster have not grasped how the European enterprise works. The EU above all else is a union built on laws, with the legal acquis applied evenly across member states. Put simply, this means governments cannot opt in to, say, free movement of goods, services and capital and then opt out of open borders for labour.

                                  When the British side calls for creativity and pragmatism in setting the parameters for a future settlement, its interlocutors turn to the rule book. None is more assiduous than German chancellor Angela Merkel in dismissing suggestions that the rules might be bent if not broken in Britain’s favour. Mrs May’s “bespoke” translates into political German as “cherry-picking”. Much as the Germans are fond of their British cousins, cherry-picking is verboten.

                                  The third lesson highlights the illusory nature of the theoretical sovereignty so prized by the Brexiters. Britain, they promised, would regain the sovereign right to wave goodbye to the morass of regulatory agencies overseeing the acquis. This has been shown to be the sovereignty of the person shipwrecked on a desert island.

                                  Britain can “take back control” — as long as it accepts, say, that business data-sharing will be outlawed, that British airlines will be barred from European airspace, and that electricity interconnectors with the continent will be shut down. This is just the start of the list. Anyone for sovereign self-harm?

                                  Comment


                                    3 The Irish Language is used by SF purely to wind up Unionists, and recognised as such in NI by pretty much all non- Nats. An Act- which I support- will do nothing to help a language that largely died in the 19th. So a deal breaker for the opposite reason that you say it is

                                    Only an Ulster Protestant could make the assumption that the primary purpose of a form of cultural expression is to wind other people up. No-other culture thinks this way, except perhaps for Isis. You can't escape from some things....

                                    The irish language act was one of the things that Sinn Fein got put in the St Andrews Agreement to help make Northern ireland seem like a warmer place for Nationalists, and give official status to a language that they consider important. It's absolutely no business whatsoever of the Unionist community, and has absolutely no impact on anyone, other than giving nationalists a bit more of a stake in Northern Ireland. It's a small part of the price to pay to have sinn fein completely embrace the Northern irish state, and the principle of consent, and give up literally everything that they spent the previous 35 years pursuing.

                                    It's also quite simply not up for discussion. conradh na gaeilge got a judicial review this year that said that the executive was breaking the law in not having had a language act within 10 years. This is not a big issue because it's about the irish language. It's a big issue because the DUP are prepared to essentially break the law, to prevent nationalists getting something that would help bind them to the Northern Irish state, The issue isn't that there isn't an Irish language act, it's really shouldn't be that big a deal. It's that the DUP are telling sinn fein that they can't have it. Firstly the DUP don't get to say that, and the fact that they are allowed to is actually a real problem.

                                    Also I don't think that generally that was a great description of the last ten years either. Sinn Fein were all into making the assembly work. political power is what they gave up violence for, and they needed a good 20 years of being in power in the north to properly transition from terrorists to basically Fianna fail. Their whole strategy was to stick with the assembly until they reached a point where young protestants became indifferent to them and they became acceptable coalition partners down south. That's why they swallowed the DUP blocking an irish language act for 10 years. But things went very badly wrong after the 2016 assembly election, and it became abundantly clear that the DUP just weren't remotely interested in power sharing with sinn fein.

                                    things got a lot worse after the 2016 assembly election, when a couple of things happened. The biggest bit was they went from Five parties being in Govt, to just sinn Fein and the DUP, and the dynamics of the govt changed completely, from four out of five parties trying to make it work, to literally everything being a straight DUP/Sinn Fein shoot out. That was always going to be a really bad idea. The second thing was the ending of the Dual Mandate, when a lot of the senior, and more extreme figures in the DUP had to leave the assembly and go to London. And since they weren't going to be there to carry out the fight personally with sinn fein, then things had to become even more extreme. Also the DUP had a new leader who had to establish her anti-sinn fein Pro union hardman credentials. But the really big thing was Brexit.

                                    The Unionist bloc veto was coming out twice a week and it was effectively impossible to get anything done. It was made abundantly clear that there was going to be no progress on the Irish language act, or gay marriage or anything, and then Arlene's civil servants revealed that she was involved in a scheme that involved shovelling hundreds of millions of public money to big farmers and small business men. and unlike Peter Robinson back in the day, she wasn't going to step down while the investigation was taking place. And it was only in November that Sinn Fein had a meeting where it became abundantly clear that the Assembly route had simply run out of road, and the time had come to stop pretending that the DUP were going to suddenly start sharing power, so the time had come to start tearing strips off the DUP.

                                    The ILA isn't something that Sinn Fein suddenly got upset about after 10 years. It's something that they have been furious about all along, but have kept swallowing it down in order to avoid collapsing the assembly.
                                    The thing is that it is in the Nature of the DUP to basically want to shit on the Taigs. It's in the Nature of the English Govt to Ignore Northern Ireland and let them get on with it. The Real root problem is that the Irish govt completely refused to follow through on their end as one of the guarantors of the process and to keep things going. The Irish Govt should have been pressurizing the UK govt to force the DUP to allow an Irish language act and a variety of other things. But The Irish govt basically decided to use the difficulties in the Assembly to undermine Sinn Fein's transition to party of Govt, and to delay their advance in the South. If there was a problem in the Northern Assembly it was as much Sinn Fein's fault as the DUP, and Sinn Fein needed to be more committed to the Institutions.

                                    The thing is that this too was a profoundly shortsighted and stupid attitude to adopt, because if the Irish Govt had kept up the pressure on the UK to make this work, Sinn Fein ministers would a) be in charge of collecting Water Charges in the North, while opposing them in principle in the south, b) throwing tens of thousands of their voters off Disability allowance instead of leading the protests and c) overseeing the bedroom tax. By allowing Sinn Fein to escape from this they allow themselves to pretend to be an anti-austerity party who would never allow themselves to be subject to budgets, or external realities. But Brexit doesn't allow the Irish govt this 'luxury' any more.

                                    But here's the thing about the Good Friday agreement. It may be tempting to think of it as something that was tried and failed and can now be ignored or abandoned. But actually there's a lot more to it than that. There are provisions in it to deal with a situation like this, and they're really not provisions that Unionists are going to like. The other thing is that it is part of the Irish constitution. It is part of what is amusingly referred to as the UK constitution, and it is an international treaty between two countries that contains a provision governing the handing over of northern Ireland. It's not going to disappear. It's just going to go to new and exciting places.

                                    And that talk about moving from the assembly to direct rule and the British Irish intergovernmental conference isn't just fanciful talk. It's Irish Govt policy now. They want one of these meetings after Christmas. Now it's unlikely that such a venture will get very far with that dribbling cretin Brokenshire, and with the UK Govt dependent on the DUP. But then again that makes it more unlikely that the Assembly is going to spontaneously start up again so the situation will remain frozen until there is a labour govt. And that's when all the weirdness is going to happen.

                                    As for the short to medium term. Sinn Fein are focused on driving a wedge between the DUP and moderate unionists. Their current strategy is to paint Arlene as a crook who is robbing poor protestants to pay big farmers, and repeatedly pointing out that the DUP are bigots in a wide variety of ways. It's a strategy that was wildly successful in the assembly election,and shrunk the DUP below the level of being able to mount a veto of anything, and to within a 1000 votes of sinn fein. The General election, and coalition with the tories has lead the DUP to seriously overplay their hand, with Nigel Dodds demanding the return of direct rule from london, which in turn will be controlled by the DUP. That may seem like a super-mega-awesome plan right now, but its really important to remember that the DUP isn't always going to be in this position, and neither are the tories, and collapsing the assembly and moving decision making power to London, moves things out of their control.

                                    The thing over the last couple of days that I would pause to think about if I were a DUP politician is arlene's interview with Tommy Gorman, where she said that the reason that the UK govt didn't tell the DUP that it was completely selling them down the river was because the Irish Govt told them not to tell them. That's the thing I would focus on. This was the first time that the Northern Irish issue came up for serious discussion, and the first instinct of the UK govt was to throw them under the bus in pursuit of the interests of the mainland. The other thing is that they lied about it, and lied about it in a really transparent and clumsy manner. The third thing I would really shit myself over right now is that Arlene couldn't see this.

                                    If you're a unionist, the one thing you know is that the Nationalists can't shoot their way to a united Ireland. The Irish Govt can't just win Northern Ireland in a game of cards. the only path to a united ireland is through betrayal by london. It was the driving force behind the Ulster Covenant, it was the cause of the Curragh Mutiny, and it has clearly been on the cards since the Anglo irish Agreement. This was one of those moments, and Arlene missed it. I would be shitting myself over this.
                                    Last edited by The Awesome Berbaslug!!!; 07-12-2017, 13:46.

                                    Comment


                                      Or in short,

                                      Right now the DUP are following a triple pronged Strategy. They are pinning the future of Northern Ireland on DUP controlled Direct rule from London, Hard Brexit being a raging economic success, and allowing themselves to be defined by Sinn Fein as anti-equality bigots and crooks that steal from their own supporters. That's a war on too many fronts. And each of those issues is going to chip away at their powerbase within their own community. They're barely the largest party in Northern Ireland and they lost their assembly veto At this point they really should start worrying that their increasingly extreme brand of unionism is going to start ot leave larger parts of their own community behind, and starting to see them as the major part of the problem.

                                      It all comes back to the same thing. The DUP wants Northern Ireland to have the same economic rules as the UK. They are in coalition with lunatics that want to leave the customs union, that means a hard border. They claim not to want a hard border, but the only way that the UK can climb down from leaving the customs union is to change their govt, which would completely fuck everything up for the DUP by putting Jeremy Corbyn in charge. It's a choice between Jeremy Corbyn Defining the role of the republic of Ireland in the direct rule of Northern Ireland, or a hard border, and a border poll that looks imminently losable.

                                      This is not good. This is all happening far too fast.

                                      Comment


                                        Irish Govt in favour of adding "Of Course this fucking treaty doesn't mean X clause" to agreement.

                                        Will that be enough? It would still involve a big climbdown by DUP, and need to get past the Hard Brexit crazies.

                                        Comment


                                          The BBC has just had plausible DUP shyster ChristoPher Montgomery to attack the Irish Republic and the EU and claim that the onlyproblem was an Irish journalist.

                                          Comment


                                            Originally posted by The Awesome Berbaslug!!! View Post
                                            3 The Irish Language is used by SF purely to wind up Unionists, and recognised as such in NI by pretty much all non- Nats. An Act- which I support- will do nothing to help a language that largely died in the 19th. So a deal breaker for the opposite reason that you say it is

                                            Only an Ulster Protestant could make the assumption that the primary purpose of a form of cultural expression is to wind other people up. No-other culture thinks this way, except perhaps for Isis. You can't escape from some things....

                                            The irish language act was one of the things that Sinn Fein got put in the St Andrews Agreement to help make Northern ireland seem like a warmer place for Nationalists, and give official status to a language that they consider important. It's absolutely no business whatsoever of the Unionist community, and has absolutely no impact on anyone, other than giving nationalists a bit more of a stake in Northern Ireland. It's a small part of the price to pay to have sinn fein completely embrace the Northern irish state, and the principle of consent, and give up literally everything that they spent the previous 35 years pursuing.

                                            It's also quite simply not up for discussion. conradh na gaeilge got a judicial review this year that said that the executive was breaking the law in not having had a language act within 10 years. This is not a big issue because it's about the irish language. It's a big issue because the DUP are prepared to essentially break the law, to prevent nationalists getting something that would help bind them to the Northern Irish state, The issue isn't that there isn't an Irish language act, it's really shouldn't be that big a deal. It's that the DUP are telling sinn fein that they can't have it. Firstly the DUP don't get to say that, and the fact that they are allowed to is actually a real problem.

                                            Also I don't think that generally that was a great description of the last ten years either. Sinn Fein were all into making the assembly work. political power is what they gave up violence for, and they needed a good 20 years of being in power in the north to properly transition from terrorists to basically Fianna fail. Their whole strategy was to stick with the assembly until they reached a point where young protestants became indifferent to them and they became acceptable coalition partners down south. That's why they swallowed the DUP blocking an irish language act for 10 years. But things went very badly wrong after the 2016 assembly election, and it became abundantly clear that the DUP just weren't remotely interested in power sharing with sinn fein.

                                            things got a lot worse after the 2016 assembly election, when a couple of things happened. The biggest bit was they went from Five parties being in Govt, to just sinn Fein and the DUP, and the dynamics of the govt changed completely, from four out of five parties trying to make it work, to literally everything being a straight DUP/Sinn Fein shoot out. That was always going to be a really bad idea. The second thing was the ending of the Dual Mandate, when a lot of the senior, and more extreme figures in the DUP had to leave the assembly and go to London. And since they weren't going to be there to carry out the fight personally with sinn fein, then things had to become even more extreme. Also the DUP had a new leader who had to establish her anti-sinn fein Pro union hardman credentials. But the really big thing was Brexit.

                                            The Unionist bloc veto was coming out twice a week and it was effectively impossible to get anything done. It was made abundantly clear that there was going to be no progress on the Irish language act, or gay marriage or anything, and then Arlene's civil servants revealed that she was involved in a scheme that involved shovelling hundreds of millions of public money to big farmers and small business men. and unlike Peter Robinson back in the day, she wasn't going to step down while the investigation was taking place. And it was only in November that Sinn Fein had a meeting where it became abundantly clear that the Assembly route had simply run out of road, and the time had come to stop pretending that the DUP were going to suddenly start sharing power, so the time had come to start tearing strips off the DUP.

                                            The ILA isn't something that Sinn Fein suddenly got upset about after 10 years. It's something that they have been furious about all along, but have kept swallowing it down in order to avoid collapsing the assembly.
                                            The thing is that it is in the Nature of the DUP to basically want to shit on the Taigs. It's in the Nature of the English Govt to Ignore Northern Ireland and let them get on with it. The Real root problem is that the Irish govt completely refused to follow through on their end as one of the guarantors of the process and to keep things going. The Irish Govt should have been pressurizing the UK govt to force the DUP to allow an Irish language act and a variety of other things. But The Irish govt basically decided to use the difficulties in the Assembly to undermine Sinn Fein's transition to party of Govt, and to delay their advance in the South. If there was a problem in the Northern Assembly it was as much Sinn Fein's fault as the DUP, and Sinn Fein needed to be more committed to the Institutions.

                                            The thing is that this too was a profoundly shortsighted and stupid attitude to adopt, because if the Irish Govt had kept up the pressure on the UK to make this work, Sinn Fein ministers would a) be in charge of collecting Water Charges in the North, while opposing them in principle in the south, b) throwing tens of thousands of their voters off Disability allowance instead of leading the protests and c) overseeing the bedroom tax. By allowing Sinn Fein to escape from this they allow themselves to pretend to be an anti-austerity party who would never allow themselves to be subject to budgets, or external realities. But Brexit doesn't allow the Irish govt this 'luxury' any more.

                                            But here's the thing about the Good Friday agreement. It may be tempting to think of it as something that was tried and failed and can now be ignored or abandoned. But actually there's a lot more to it than that. There are provisions in it to deal with a situation like this, and they're really not provisions that Unionists are going to like. The other thing is that it is part of the Irish constitution. It is part of what is amusingly referred to as the UK constitution, and it is an international treaty between two countries that contains a provision governing the handing over of northern Ireland. It's not going to disappear. It's just going to go to new and exciting places.

                                            And that talk about moving from the assembly to direct rule and the British Irish intergovernmental conference isn't just fanciful talk. It's Irish Govt policy now. They want one of these meetings after Christmas. Now it's unlikely that such a venture will get very far with that dribbling cretin Brokenshire, and with the UK Govt dependent on the DUP. But then again that makes it more unlikely that the Assembly is going to spontaneously start up again so the situation will remain frozen until there is a labour govt. And that's when all the weirdness is going to happen.

                                            As for the short to medium term. Sinn Fein are focused on driving a wedge between the DUP and moderate unionists. Their current strategy is to paint Arlene as a crook who is robbing poor protestants to pay big farmers, and repeatedly pointing out that the DUP are bigots in a wide variety of ways. It's a strategy that was wildly successful in the assembly election,and shrunk the DUP below the level of being able to mount a veto of anything, and to within a 1000 votes of sinn fein. The General election, and coalition with the tories has lead the DUP to seriously overplay their hand, with Nigel Dodds demanding the return of direct rule from london, which in turn will be controlled by the DUP. That may seem like a super-mega-awesome plan right now, but its really important to remember that the DUP isn't always going to be in this position, and neither are the tories, and collapsing the assembly and moving decision making power to London, moves things out of their control.

                                            The thing over the last couple of days that I would pause to think about if I were a DUP politician is arlene's interview with Tommy Gorman, where she said that the reason that the UK govt didn't tell the DUP that it was completely selling them down the river was because the Irish Govt told them not to tell them. That's the thing I would focus on. This was the first time that the Northern Irish issue came up for serious discussion, and the first instinct of the UK govt was to throw them under the bus in pursuit of the interests of the mainland. The other thing is that they lied about it, and lied about it in a really transparent and clumsy manner. The third thing I would really shit myself over right now is that Arlene couldn't see this.

                                            If you're a unionist, the one thing you know is that the Nationalists can't shoot their way to a united Ireland. The Irish Govt can't just win Northern Ireland in a game of cards. the only path to a united ireland is through betrayal by london. It was the driving force behind the Ulster Covenant, it was the cause of the Curragh Mutiny, and it has clearly been on the cards since the Anglo irish Agreement. This was one of those moments, and Arlene missed it. I would be shitting myself over this.
                                            Especially when your actions are losing the 10% who vote "Other":

                                            https://mobile.twitter.com/conorhdfm...657344/photo/2

                                            Comment


                                              I dread a border poll in NI where reunification wins. Shit would kick off quite badly up there.

                                              All the DUP had to swallow to keep NI in the UK for 100 years at least was (1) being in the EU (2) a power sharing assembly (3) bilingual road signs. A seriously minor price to pay. But apparently even that is too much.

                                              They remind me of the Japanese soldier found in the jungle of Indonesia in the 80s, still awaiting orders to stand down from Hirohito. Those orders were sent and he stood down. Unfortunately, King Billy is no longer alive to tell these people to stand down.

                                              Comment


                                                Originally posted by Nefertiti2 View Post
                                                Michael Hestletine used to make the sovereign desert island argument. I didn't hear anybody much make it in the referendum.

                                                Comment


                                                  Originally posted by antoine polus View Post
                                                  I dread a border poll in NI where reunification wins. Shit would kick off quite badly up there.

                                                  All the DUP had to swallow to keep NI in the UK for 100 years at least was (1) being in the EU (2) a power sharing assembly (3) bilingual road signs. A seriously minor price to pay. But apparently even that is too much.

                                                  They remind me of the Japanese soldier found in the jungle of Indonesia in the 80s, still awaiting orders to stand down from Hirohito. Those orders were sent and he stood down. Unfortunately, King Billy is no longer alive to tell these people to stand down.
                                                  The Toriy-Kippers are waiting for the ghost of Enoch Powell to appear to them and stand them down. We might have a long wait.

                                                  Comment


                                                    DR do you have a link for that lucid talk poll? I can't find it anywhere

                                                    Comment

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