It is currently popular among those who make money writing media articles about politics, to argue that Boris Johnson will implode next year and be replaced as Tory leader by someone more rational and conventional. I very much doubt this: the most important reason for that doubt being the power of the atavistic English nationalist forces that Johnson has unleashed in British politics. Astonishingly, despite the UK government’s hideously inept performance in the Covid crisis, and the corruption and looting of the public purse on a massive scale for which the pandemic has been used, the Conservatives still lead Labour in the UK opinion polls.
Partly that is due to Sir Keir Starmer having no apparent policy other than to ensure that no party member ever criticises Israel. But it is mostly due to the fact that Johnson’s supporters do not care what happens to the country, as long as they can see news footage of black people being deported on charter planes and immigrant children washed up dead rather than rescued. The racist brand is very, very strong in England. Cummings and Johnson’s plan to appropriate it and target the areas of England with lowest levels of educational achievement as their new political base still holds up as a political strategy. Look at the polls.
Tory MP’s care about themselves. They will ditch Johnson extremely quickly if he becomes a perceived electoral liability and therefore a threat to their own jobs. But as long as the Tories are ahead in the opinion polls, then Johnson is secure. The idea that there is a norm to which politics revert is a false one. Many of the same pundits who are assuring us now that Johnson will depart, also assured us that his kicking out moderate and pro-EU Conservatives from his party, and removing Remainers from his Cabinet, was a temporary move to be reversed post-election. There is in fact no going back to the norm.
Even the dimmest Labour Party members must now realise that Starmer lied when he promised he would carry on with Corbyn’s radical economic policies if elected to the leadership of the Labour Party. The Corbyn phenomenon was interesting. It arose as a reaction to the massively burgeoning wealth inequality in UK society and the great loss of secure employment opportunity with rights and benefits available to the large bulk of the population. That situation continues to worsen. Brexit was in large part a cry of pain resulting from the same causes. But Brexit in itself is going to do nothing to improve the social position or economic prospects of the working class.
Whether the novelty of Brexit will in the long term continue to be enough to channel the desire for radical change away from actual programmes of redistribution of wealth and ownership, I doubt. I suspect the Starmer project will falter on public reluctance to yet again embrace a choice of two Tory parties, and Starmer will be ejected as Labour leader before he can become the third Blue Labour PM. In the meantime, I can only urge those in England to vote Green. I can certainly see no reason to vote Labour and validate the Starmer purge.
As a former professional diplomat, I am going to be astonished if there is not a Brexit deal announced very shortly. It is plainly highly achievable given the current state of negotiations. The EU have moved very far in agreeing that an independent UK body, as opposed to the European Court of Justice, can be responsible for policing UK compliance with standards regulation to ensure against undercutting. The “ratchet clause” sticking point, where a mechanism is needed to ensure the UK does not undercut future improved EU regulatory regimes, can be resolved with some fudged wording on the mutual obligation to comply with the highest standards, but which does not quite force the EU to simply copy UK regulation in the improbable event it becomes more demanding than the EU regime. By making the obligation theoretically mutual the “sovereignty” argument about UK subservience to EU regulations and standards is met, which is the ultra Tory Brexiteers biggest fetish. Fisheries is even simpler to solve, with obvious compromises on lengths of agreement periods and quotas within easy grasp.
It should not be forgotten that David Frost is not the plain loutish Brexiteer he has so spectacularly enhanced his career by impersonating domestically, but is the smooth and effective professional diplomat he shows when actually interacting with Barnier. It could only be an act of utter lunacy that would lead Johnson to eschew a deal that the Express and Mail will be able to trumpet as a massive victory over Johnny Foreigner. I expect we shall be seeing a union jacked apotheosis of saviour Johnson all over the media by a week from now at the very latest – another reason he will not be leaving office.
It is of course, all smoke and mirrors. By expectation management, a deal which is a far harder Brexit than anybody imagined when Theresa May set down her infamous red lines, will be greeted by a relieved business community as better than actually blowing your own brains out. As I have stated ever since the repression of the Catalan referendum, I can live with leaving the EU and live with abandoning its political and security pillars. I continue to view leaving the single market and losing the great advantage of free movement as disastrous.
One thing that has been very little publicised is that, deal or no deal, the UK is going to fudge the worst consequences by simply not on 1 January applying the new rules at the borders. There will not be immigration checks on the 86% of truck drivers entering the UK who are EU citizens, for the first six months. Otherwise the queues by mid January would scarcely be contained by Kent itself. Similarly, the UK side will not be applying the new customs paperwork on 1 January except on a “random sampling” basis. Those who are eagerly anticipating chaos on 1 January will thus probably be disappointed. In fact the deleterious economic effects of Brexit are quite probably going to take some time to show through in a definite way. I do not believe we will see either empty shelves or major price hikes in the first few weeks.
My prediction is this: Boris will agree his thin deal and at the end of January the Brexiteers will be gloating that the predicted disaster did not happen. Effects on economic growth and employment will take some time to be plainly identified, and it will be mortifying how readily the Tories will twist the narrative to blame the EU, and also to obtain English nationalist support for the notion that this gradual pain is worth it in pursuit of a purer country, with less immigration. That may sound crazy to you. But is it not crazy to you that the Tories are still ahead in UK polls after the last year? Mark my words; hope that Boris Johnson will simply vanish is very misplaced.
There is of course the possibility that Johnson is indeed completely bonkers and will not agree any deal at all, in which case 1 January chaos is unavoidable and all bets are off. I should be very surprised indeed. But then I did not think Trump would be mad enough not to concede the US Presidential election. Trying to predict the irrational mind is a pointless undertaking. I don’t think Johnson is that irrational; but I have been wrong before.
Trump mad? Maybe. Maybe $200+ million mad.
Grifters got to grift.
https://twitter.com/bradheath/status/1334998498580815872?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1334998498580815872%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nakedcapitalism.com%2F2020%2F12%2Flinks-12-8-2020.html
Trump/Boris crazies are ubiquitous
It must be the mask mandates
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/canada-warns-conspiracy-theorists-could-burn-5g-towers-claiming-link-virus
Apparently by hewing to the reactionary right on national security, militarism, Brexit, immigration, Israel, etc, Keir Starmer is cleverly avoiding getting dragged into a culture war and will capture Downing Street on perceived competence alone.
But it was only a heartbeat ago that the same people saying this were celebrating him as the cosmopolitan-liberal King of Remain, –architect of the second referendum policy that lost Labour swathes of seats in the Midlands, North and Wales. An image Starmer himself revelled in.
Given that baggage it is difficult to understand – unless you are an SW1 scribe – how he regains those provincial Brexit seats and adds many more besides, specially if he abandons Corbyn’s economic programme and reverts to offering little more than austerity and war.
He may have been the establishment choice as reserve figurehead of British Capital but there was never evidence of wider public popularity, beyond fanatical remainers whom he sold out at the first opportunity. Nothing about his efforts to become PM make sense unless you are a Mandelson-selected Labour MP or a salaried member of the fourth estate. I suspect he will be buried no matter what and will in all likelihood be removed as leader before the next election, as you suggest.
Starmer will not need to regain any seats to be PM.
We are living in a post coup state – 12 months almost – the Junta are going to appoint him, by wrapping him in a bloody GNUskin, to head the country in a grand coalition to see us through the dark days of Covid and BrexShit followed by a election down the line sometime. Depending on fixing the polls until he can be re-elected ‘officially’.
In the meantime he has to destroy the NHS and whatever else is left, especially the largest membership of a political party in Europe. Can’t be having pesky local members choosing local candidates!
Plausible, probable even
There is no reason not to police the border and new customs regulations by anything other than intelligence led or statistical sampling. This is how many rules are enforced, particularly if the penalties are sufficient for non compliance. No doubt a civil servant would want a Byzantine paperwork cross check of every last widget, but real people and exporting companies just want government out of their face.
It is largely how income tax is handled. Pubs do not have a state monitor sitting in a corner checking nobody smokes and the times of last orders. Very few vehicle checkpoints are set up to check all paperwork is in order.
But… hauliers coming into the UK will generally want to take goods back with them, to make the journey efficient and economical.
The UK have already said they don‘t intend to have full checks for the first six months (see https://www.civilserviceworld.com/professions/article/uk-ditches-plan-for-full-postbrexit-border-checks-on-eu-goods), but if the EU decides to impose full checks then there will be still be complications and delays for round trips.
The Port of Calais have been stress testing their processes and software systems for over a year now (see https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-30/france-to-stage-brexit-rehearsal-in-port-of-calais-with-gove). The UK software isn‘t quite ready yet (see https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252491144/Not-enough-time-to-get-software-ready-for-end-of-Brexit-transition-period-warns-industry).
I take no pleasure in saying this, these are just the facts on the ground. Michael Gove left the UK exposed by not getting it as well prepared as France and the Netherlands for no-deal. As such the EU has a number of ways to potentially play this and would appear to be in quite a strong position. They could decide to match the UK light-touch approach to smooth the transition. Or they could decide for apply full checks on day one of Brexit for leverage.
Gove and the company of clowns have no worry about goods coming in from the EU – they have a fleet of Boeing 737maxes waiting to fly in as much gmo, hormoned, antibiotic fed , chlorinated, corn starched food in the greatest airlift ever! Finally confirming us as the very special fwiends and allies the BiE/Fed always wanted, so we can march off to protect and liberate and install democracy on the planet to stop them all carrying on without us. Starting with the Hun again.
Announcing a Brexit deal too soon i.e. before the 28th December would surely put a real damper on Festive ‘no deal’ – driven panic-buying, stockpiling retail sales. The supermarkets and retail trade in general would be most displeased. Something Johnson will surely have factored into the timing of any announcement.
I guess what we are really hoping for is that someone else has thought about it for him.
“Left to his own devices, Boris will wander off from decisions and read Pliny or Pericles or eat or shag,”
This quote is from a former cabinet colleague. Johnson doesn’t seem to think much beyond getting himself to the end of the day.
The Internal Market Bill/Withdrawal Agreement “crisis” was entirely avoidable and self-inflicted if he was genuinely capable of thinking about long-term strategy and not just digging himself out of the latest hole into which he had fallen.
I don’t know who you are reading, Craig, but i haven’t seen any great consensus of commentators claiming that Johnson will be gone next year, or that things will ‘revert’ to ‘normal’. There will be no normal after brexit, just years of slow decline and inward-looking factionalism. Johnson has lost whatever spell he had the atavistic tories under, so in time will probably be replaced, but much closer to an election, which is four years away. Maybe you are arguing with straw men?
Interestingly the bookies have got Rishi Sunak favourite for the next Tory leader. Rish Sunaki is also favourite for the next Prime Minister (9/4) with Keir Starmer in second place (3/1).
Likely your polling is bolloxed since the UK is going down the same path as US.
NB The odds are for RS taking over from Johnson rather than RS winning a general election, whereas for KS the given odds are for him winning a GE. So it is a bit of an complex statistic and not a great comparison.
Fair enough point, S, but it is the best we have got to go on in the absence of any ‘Party to Win the Next General Election’ odds 😉
There are two reasons why Johnson will be gone by Easter –
1) https://www.conservativehome.com/thetorydiary/2020/12/truss-tops-our-cabinet-league-table-for-the-first-time.html Johnson is *deeply* unpopular among the parliamentary party and among Tory voters. Yes, in public they all routinely express absolute loyalty, just as you’d expect, but they know he is a deeply unreliable liar who has not only fucked up the Covid response through wilful negligence, but also the Brexit he delivers will please almost no one, so the Tory civil war will continue.
2) A relative who works in Tory CCHQ confirms the ‘ill health’ rumours (off the record) and says a leadership contest is expected in March 2021. Make of that what you will, but this is a person who has always been 100% trustworthy in my experience and rarely trades empty gossip (my relative, that is – not Johnson, of course…).
The Men in Grey Suits will get rid of Johnson eventually but in my opinion it will be a compromise stand down.
100 things to do before you die is one of Johnson’s ticks- that is write crap articles – become PM etc etc.
He is bored and getting fatter by the day and he will jack it eventually.
The irony is that the vaccine(s) will rescue the government and Starmer,s job is to make sure that ‘ The Left ‘ never gets near power ever.
We can all have our opinions and there is nothing wrong in that, but reality intervenes as always and there are great ‘ challenges ‘ as the BBC keeps saying over the vaccine horizon.
The West was knackered before this virus due to lack of investment and the so called 1% need to continue the accrual of profits higher than the year before.
For this to happen XY and Z things need to happen via the government – meaning Laws have to be enacted to facilitate this.
That means ( to myself at least ) that austerity plus laws have to come into being/existence.
This for the UK is it s ‘ Sunny Uplands ‘ future.
the question is – is:
How do the opposition to austerity combat this class war?
I’ll ask again:
Being as Starmer’s job is to kill the left and the Tories job is to fulfill austerity for their employers ( the 1%) then who is going to take on the Right ?
I can say that in the early Eighties that the left could have only dreamt of getting 33% of the turnout vote.
There is something to work on and with.
How it works is difficult – but there is a political base of some size.
By the way Independence is part of that whole – as long as it is genuinely progressive and not regressive nationalism.
More what you are for than against.
“A relative who works in Tory CCHQ confirms the ‘ill health’ rumours” That’s news to me! I thought Boris had successfully fought off Covid. Of course he might have been unlucky enough to get long Covid.
The Tories will still be in power, though. If Boris is out by the time most people (i.e. not young) are vaccinated, I wonder who would win an election contest.
Entirely agree that we are stuck with the Fat Etonian for the long haul. It hasn’t taken long for Starmer to emerge as having minimal socialist content, and for Cummings to serve as the scapegoat to satisfy popular bloodlust in the short-term. If the vaccine works then whoever happens to be in power will be able to take the credit for it, and it is likely to be years before a true picture will fully emerge. And if there is no deal or a shite deal with the EU, the impact of covid-19 will help mask the resultant economic damage for a long time to come.
Depressing indeed.
re: “racist brand”; Piers Morgan on GMTV felt he had to mention that the first anti PCR positive vaccine was administered by a “Filipino nurse”. Relevant only to people who can’t accept that we live in an age of relatively affordable travel, be it by plane or dinghy.
“[..] lowest levels of educational achievement […]”
I wonder how you construed this when you wrote it; I wonder how your average/typical reader construes the sentence from which I’ve extracted it?
I wonder if they regard education as a means of creating a class to replace or run along side the current class system, so that those who are ‘educated’ can sneer and look down on those who aren’t ‘educated’? Do they construe it to mean that the ‘educated’ don’t have to do the shit jobs that the ‘uneducated’ have to do?
In other words, ‘education’ is the Mississippi experiment being inflicted upon us, not for pedagogic reasons, but for control.
Anyone who courts and tries to help the ‘uneducated’ is helping the erstwhile working class, a class despised by New Labour on this side of the Atlantic, and the Democrats on the other side.
In your simplistic caricature of a political analysis … I’m with Boris.
Surely what counts on a moral level is simply whether Craig observes correctly that there are identifiable areas in the UK with lower achievement? If he’s wrong that Johnson and Cummings targeted them that is a separate matter.
@Gyges – By the Mississippi experiment do you mean conjugal prison visits??
Britain has been in slow relative decline for over a hundred years. Sadly most people do not know what GDP per capita on a PPP basis is and how badly we fare:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
And guess which party has been in power for most of that time and must therefore bear most responsibility?…
I don’t think however that the solution to low wages and high house prices is unlimited immigration and allowing overseas capitalists to “invest” in UK housing stock. Free movement of goods & services, yes: people & capital, I’m much less convinced.
Not to mention I do not believe poaching ambitious, young or well qualified staff from poorer countries because we cannot be bothered to train or invest is acceptable, even before Covid.
East Kent “racist”
Dave
Many people only own the garden shed. The rest is interest past and future. The lure of house value increase is in reality merely an interest cost increase. We are literally buying debt, Starmer represents mr and mrs average, whose bodies are immersed in mortgage debt up to their necks and rising. The ever present threat of bankrupcy or homelessness serves as a strong deterrent to political dissent.
Same as Craig expressed the opinion that the Belarus election was not rigged, yes Starmer represents almost bankrupt Britain. Much too broke to worry about illegal wars, Is that bankrupt Britain racist? I think it deeply resents those like Corbyn on the Left who are concerned about foreigners and appear to be unable to address their , domestic, struggle with holding onto the necessities of life.
Boris’s trick is to sneer at the Left for their inability to counter the absolute corruption of the professional classes, the bankers, estate agents, insurance vultures etc, while simultaneously owning a house worth 11 million pounds + God knows what other assets besides. What Labour needs is now is someone to turn the public against those corrupt Tory professional institutions of daylight robbery. But Corbyn had to address the problem of Blair’s Labour Party illegal wars first. That’s done, Thank You Mr Corbyn.
You don’t need to be PM to educate the public about Tory corruption. While on the other hand the Tories only need a fat , lazy, oaf to fill the seat of power with oafish incompetency, and their job is done..
‘Political dissent’ is a luxury afforded only to those who are comfortable enough to have to never have to earn a living or keep a roof over their heads. The prospect of a criminal record is enough to deter most people. Jacques Ellul talked about ‘police technique’ in his book ‘The Technological Society’. Western society has moved to the ‘dossier technique’. This is a much more effective means of ‘control’ than say, public executions, which although they may impact initially become less and less effective over time as the populace gradually become inured to them. That is the real reason why we don’t have public executions any more. They are ineffective as a means of ‘control’.
This is why at demos the Police are so keen to identify as many protesters as possible, any excuse, any pretext, ‘kettlling’, pulling over coaches, to ‘take down your details’. That is why they are really there for; that is their primary function – to get you on their database.
‘You will get a criminal record’ and ‘it may affect your credit rating’ is what keeps the vast amount of the public from dissenting, such a large enough proportion that any ‘dissent’ is stifled from the get-go.
«The prospect of a criminal record is enough to deter most people.»
I think that most people have realized that there are extensive black lists of “undesirable” employees, and people on those black lists will never again a job which is above minimum wage. In particular cases the security services will have a quiet word with the employer and the undesirable person will soon be terminated with one excuse or another.
The only protection against that is labour rights laws, and strong trade unions, but that is not currently the case.
Would you advise Scots voters to vote Green, too? The Greens used to have a strong presence in the Scottish Parliament, are far more progressive than the SNP, and also support independence.
Do I really have to respond as if you honestly believe that? Dude or dudette, you are creeping me out.
That’s sounds like a peculiar kind of “not being in the customs union”.
Fishing rights are being put on the front pages as chaff – a minor issue, easily resolved, but which is capable of yielding photos to push the “Who does Johnny Continental think he is, taking such outrageous liberties?” meme, not to mention “Remember the Armada”.
The “City of London’s” “rights” on the continent are the most important issue.
Meanwhile it’s hard to envisage a Portakabin lasting long in Larne with a little EU flag flying from it and a picture of the Virgin Mary stuck in the window to the cupboard where the Spanish or Portuguese cleaner keeps her broom and cloths. F***ing with the still well-armed Protestant gangsters on their own turf by raising their enemy’s colours would be asking for trouble. They’re not as hard as the City of London which could eat them for breakfast any day of the week, but they’re still hard.
An awful lot of money could be made, and fast, out of a breakdown of trade, or “chaos”, and not just at the ports (sea and air) but everywhere in the country. There were those who lined their pockets like nobody’s business out of the siege of Leningrad. If interests that control Johnson could bring this about, the diplomats might be left reeling and not knowing what the hell just happened.
A clear sign that this is coming will be successive delays to the agreement, and thus no triumphal passage in the next week or two of Boris Johnson under Marble Arch in London wearing a laurel wreath.
On the part of those who do NOT want “chaos” (i.e. a billionaires’ super-payday with famine), it will be craziness to play along with a delay. A last-minute fudge is unlikely. They get weaker as the end of 31 December approaches.
You would expect that there has been some huge bets placed by the likes of Jacob Rees-Moggs, hedge funds, and hedge funds owned by Jacob Rees-Mogg on a ‘no-deal’ Brexit. And maybe George Soros has taking a punt shorting (into oblivion) the Great British Pound once again. No matter how unlikely we think that a ‘no-deal’ Brexit is there must be some huge, powerful and influential vested interests pushing hard for one behind the scenes. It was Lord Rothschild who said that the time to make money is when blood is flowing on the streets.
Yes. “No deal” looks likely. Or “Christmas” for finance capital. Or “Marilyn”, as the Bhopal disaster was known in certain law firms. Like the Icelandic collapse but times 100 for the size of the economy (or ex-economy would be more like it), and then times another 10 or perhaps 100 for magnitude PER the size of the economy. It’s remarkable that some who understand that the banks got “bailed out” in 2008 because they held the western world to ransom, being prepared to let it collapse if they weren’t paid, blithely believe that problems caused by the economy coming to a standstill for months in 2020 supposedly because of a virus epidemic can somehow be paid for by the government setting its printing machines whirring. “Experts” (who mostly don’t have a clue where value is produced, probably believing it’s produced on City trading floors and by bookmakers, estate agents, and “loan providers”) “predict” a “V-shaped” “recovery” – and of course nobody is in a position to hold anyone to ransom, ooh no, perish the thought. And that is the background to Brexit. You have to add Brexit on top of it. British “experts” use the offensive word “PIIGS” to denote “Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain”. Are they going to change that acronym? Will they add in Britain in capitals (or “the UK” as the “expert” morons call it) and put the others in lower case, maybe? Ah but “resilience”, lol. Yeah, right. “Resilience” in a country that can’t even keep its main ports open.
In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity. – Sun Tzu
Another thing: The likes of Johnson, JRM and their cronies despise the welfare state, human rights, workers rights and pretty much everything that makes a successful social-democratic state what it is. (Of course, the same don’t have any objection to “socialism for the rich”). Economic chaos would provide an opportunity to remodel UK society and do away with all these pesky obstacles to corporate and personal enrichment. It would also allow the privatisation” (= selling off at bargain prices) of the NHS.
The dramatic cuts to the services provided on the NHS since fascism started in March could be filed under “asset stripping” in that If the rulers were to reopen “non-urgent” surgery wards on the prive and at high charges to patients they’d get some takers but nine-tenths of the square footage of the building space could be allowed to go to rot. Or maybe a corner here and there could be opened as a casino or nightclub or debt advice desk. A case of burn down whatever is not profitable. Tory heaven.
March? Where’ve you been Rip van Winkle?
Apropos rotten buildings, why do you think the Private Finance Fraud was used to replace big hospitals with small ones? Small ones will fit the part of the population able to afford the entry fee. I can’t wait to get my 40 years’ worth of National Insurance back….NOT!
The NHS has already stopped providing much of the health treatment it provided before fascism:
“Covid: NHS long waits 100 times higher than before” (BBC).
“… As a former professional diplomat, I am going to be astonished if there is not a Brexit deal announced very shortly… “
I’ve always been inclined to that view, too, and it will be twisted to make it appear that a victory has been scored against the EU. Johnson might be a clownish PM but he is not completely stupid. I have always thought that he was brought in/ushered in/tempted in to fulfil Brexit, and if he stays too long, he will outstay his welcome even for the right-wing Tories. in effect, the Tory party in power is now far more right wing than even Nigel Farage might have hoped for. That is not to say that Johnson will be ousted any time soon, but he will have a shelf life that the back-stabbers in his own party will support for as long as he is useful, and he knows that, too. I suspect he might even have agreed to ‘do’ Brexit then skedaddle in favour of someone less clownish but even more right-wing, or just as right-wing, but not too soon to give the game away.
I also think that people will tolerate Brexit far more than some have predicted and that is why the polls on Scottish independence are not wholly reliable. People who have to be persuaded by fear for their own financial status alone, rarely see the bigger picture on independence and some of them cannot be relied upon either when push comes to shove. If the SNP leadership is relying on people being so alienated by Brexit that they rise in spontaneous revolt, she has made a mistake, I think, if she doesn’t strike while the iron is hot and lets 2021 slip through her fingers. Hunkering down and keeping schtum might be more attractive to the average middle-class Scot, and, if the poorest in our society suffer, well, so be it.
The really adverse effects of Brexit are going to take some time to filter through, and before the worst of them do, Holyrood will be stripped of much of its power. It is intended, I think, that Scotland should become, in reality, the region so many in England see it as now, on a par with the big English regions/cities, all of which will be looking to expand their power and influence within a British framework. Mr Jack’s nice new building, which will house all those thousands of jobs – all brought up from England, with minimal benefit to the Scots – was not built to be a doll’s house. It was built to rival Holyrood, then subsume it, as funding is diverted away from Holyrood, to be disbursed as largesse from Tory Mr Jack’s building.
Never mind, eh? We can congratulate ourselves on how very progressive we are – unless you are a natal woman, of course, or someone who believes in free speech, then it’s regression with a capital ‘R’ – in a backwater that used to be called… what was it again… oh, yes, Scotland.
In the event that there is a Brexit deal the British rulers will certainly portray it to their home market as a matter of Johnny Continental tried it on with Blighty, and Mr Posh in Number 10 who may not know how to comb his own hair (or keep his todger in his trousers) but who went to Eton and who proved his mettle in the end as was also inevitable, backed by the “best civil service in the world”, etc., told Mr Continental exactly where to get off, saw through all of Mr Continental’s vile but cheap tricks. called Mr Continental’s bluff and won the game in the end. It would be so vomitworthy as to make any decent person living in Britain want to get on a ferry across the Channel and never come back. A more likely scenario though will be the Reverend Malthus’s big day, which would make any decent person living in Britain want to…
Example headline from the Sun: “Brits could be barred from entering EU from January 1 unless they pay £75.50 to renew passports”.
Basically we’ll have to have at least six months left on our passports. What did people expect? You wonder how many Sun readers have ever visited a country where they required a visa to get in. But it makes sense for them to enjoy such a headline when you realise that they thought “Brexit” was a way of spelling “Send them back without any consequences other than not having them here any more”, or in short that “Leave” meant “Make them leave”.
I’m a great fan of Chris Grey’s Brexit Blog. He has a very accurate psychological perception of the Brexiters. It might be worth perusing. It doesn’t quite fit with Craig’s view as a diplomat. The inane, or insane, nationalism of the Brexiters – there’s no point where it can stop, without a catastrophe. A smoke and mirrors job, I could see it succeeding in the short term, for another few months, but not in the long term. Not calmly for four years till the next election.
Here’s hoping the EU walk away. No deal for the brexshitters. Let them choke on it.
Craig Post author
December 8, 2020 at 11:01
You say:
“There is a definite correlation between areas of low educational achievement and areas that voted Brexit.
A simple statement of fact.”
————————————————————
Craig I would be very interested in seeing the statistics you have used to justify that statement.
How have we found out which areas have ‘low educational achievement’?
Eton?
Correlation is not causality. There were no nuclear weapons before women got the vote.
Very Brave Craig, keep on writing mate
Thanks Craig that all sounds very plausible
Craig, great comic turn of phrase on Twitter.
Hypocrisy everywhere.Trinidad and Tobago recently said it has deported 160 Venezuelans.They have been doing it for years.A bit of Karma there.What goes round comes round.
“Johnson’s supporters do not care what happens to the country, as long as they can see news footage of black people being deported on charter planes and immigrant children washed up dead rather than rescued.”
Frankly, this is the kind of rhetoric I would expect to see from an America opponent of Trump. During the past year I have seen the stress of Corona affect a lot of previously, reliably even-handed commentators, pushing them toward more emotive responses to topics. I understand that Craig is under far more stress than the average person and can ignore the occasional bout of cathartic ranting. Even so, I hope this is not symptomatic of the increasingly polarised viewpoints adopted across the pond, whereby the opposing team are demonised, not simply as being composed entirely of their worst elements, but as a caricature that does not exist in any rational interpretation of reality.
Johnson may not be irrational but that doesn’t mean he’s either right or wrong the truth is out there but probably not within the Tory Party
I.E he Boris Johnson probably actually believes he is correct but that doesn’t mean that he is or for that matter isn’t the Truth is out there and the truth should prevail no matter what
There’s also the question whether Von Der Leyen is the right person for Johnson to be going to make a late-night deal with. Does she have the freedom of action to make a compromise? Not sure. She is not a head of government. I know Johnson fancies himself doing a late-night deal personally with his opposite-number leader, much on the model of the Oslo Accords in 1993. Apart from the fact that the consequences of Oslo should have warned anyone against such a practice, VDL is not head of state, and sovereign decision lies in the council of leaders, voted upon by the parliament.
Having thought about, I am not sure, (but could be proved wrong later today) that success in the diplomatic negotiation, which Craig rightly applauds, will necessarily lead to a political decision of compromise rationality. Brexitism is an ideology and any compromise will inevitably lead to accusations of stabbing in the back, and Johnson is much the prisoner of the Ultra Brexiters (or may now be one himself, some people say). It is not a question of countries reaching rational decisions through diplomatic negotiation.
Sorry, misworded myself: “VDL is not head of state” should be head of government.
As I see it, Murells statement to the inquiry yesterday was diametrically opposed to the statement NS sent to them, i.e he contradicted what she said.
Mind, perjury seems to be a sport much more preferred than Golf, for the SNP upper echelon.
Does it matter what he said, once you achieved over 20% in an internal snp election?
Don’t forget European border forces, there only human after all.
The pressure,
I haven’t heard or read a single line yet about Gibraltar, have they done a separate deal with Spain?
??
Although no-one would doubt that French douaniers would need to stop for apéro (apéritif)(bars have been discovered in French police stations, to public shock), even if we haven’t yet got to 1st Jan, Felixstowe is already in chaos, Honda has had to stop production for lack of parts, and I saw yesterday that there are more ports already clogged up (but I haven’t got the list).
Apparently, the ports are clogged up because all that PPE has finally started to arrive and the companies that ordered it have no distribution arranged, presumably because they have already been paid for it and don’t care any more.
Someone said at the outset that this negotiation like many before it will end up with a last minute deal. It is ‘normal. I fully expect them to reach an agreement also.
Never bought into this idea that BJ would be ousted any time soon. The guy just won a historic massive majority as leader and PM. He is not going anywhere.
(I’d be keeping my eye on the treacherous little snake Michael Gove though if I was him.)
Everybody thought Cummings was going to be there for ever, as no-one could get him out, and then suddenly he was gone.
We have no evidence to support your statement. The real question is where is he now and what is he doing ?
Poll conducted exclusively in Scotland in September this year by Theresa May’s polling guru asked for a response to the proposition, “Boris Johnson is not the leader I want for my country.”. Answer: 88% agree, 12% disagree. The commissioning agent for this poll remains a mystery, my guess would be Better Together or These Islands (AstroTurf outfits awash with millionaires cash). The press release accompanying the poll stated that Scottish focus groups uniquely “loathed” Johnson.
Someone is collecting ammunition to use against Johnson. The men in grey suits want Johnson gone before the Holyrood election in May.
Yes, Johnson is loathed nationally and internationally, but who would replace him ?
Is there anyone, at all, in the Tory party that engenders confidence ?
Like Trump, you replace the figurehead but you still get the same sh*t.
Johnson is not going to stay just because there’s no decent replacement (Gove, Sunak?). In my view he’s been losing it for a while – covid is too much for him, to which is now added the catastrophe of Brexit. Since Cummings left, there’s no-one to run the show. How long that’s going to last, I don’t know, but not four years.
The key point for us in Scotland is that we didn’t vote for him and we cannot vote to get rid of him. We have to wait until he makes a complete bollocks of everything ruining people’s lives and killing others through incompetence and the English decide to vote him out. Only to be followed by another arsehole.
That is not democracy for Scotland it is subservience, subjugation and humiliation and has been the case since some Barons/Earls and other gentry sold out their country to England.
Exactly Cubby….Well said
An excellent article, but….. the moneyed class of England know where it bread is buttered, and Sir Jim Ratcliffe Tory extremist, that well known brexiteer and multi billionaire has moved his factory from Wales to France!
Now as we very well know, greed is a Tory motivator, as they know, they have no decency values and no chance of ever being held to account. So why did he move? There will be no deal! That in my eyes was the outcome necessary to make further changes to the political landscape of these nations. God help us!
As I have stated before, there cannot be a deal, UK banking sector will not be hamstrung by those money laundering legislation from 2004 and add ons which the U.K. Banks were supposedly to implement by 2015 at the latest, and still today, not implemented. Why, for the past three hundred years those well known individual have lived in luxury and splendour from the heroin industry, from death and destruction, do you think for one second they will allow you or me to know these facts. These EU money laundering laws would give auditors access to these accounts when found. No longer would banks be able to cascade money through hundreds of thousands of accounts in various countries, in various accounts, and various banks and being unable to follow as at present, You as an auditor could pick one account, and follow it to end user!
We shall see, if banking law less money laundering legislation, is adopted then there will be an agreement, if Tories get a by, there will be an agreement, if banking legislation is EU must, there will be no agreement.
Cascading money through many different accounts to hide its origin is known as ‘tumbling’ 😉
As bad as Johnson is, it is naive to believe great good would result from him being replaced. No matter what more he does he will still struggle to inflict as much misery and destruction as those “moderate and pro-EU Conservatives” did back in the pre-Brexit Golden Age of austerity and Libya.