Revoke Article 50 - open letter to MPs

I'm trying not to make this blog one long despairing howl of Brexit pain, but life comes at you fast and we're now in national crisis territory, as the Operation Yellowhammer/Redfold civil emergency plans & explosive growth in numbers signing the petition to revoke Article 50 show us.

That's why this post is just an adaptation of a letter I've written to my MP, hopefully as a rough template/inspiration for others who've already written asking their representaives in Parliament to back a referedum on the final deal and been brushed off with a bland boilerplate reply and the asserion that the UK is leaving the EU on the 29th of March and we must all "unite" to make the mess we've been presented with work.

Please feel free to copy n' paste use, adapt, critique, write a better letter, whatever. But please try to do something. It may be more in hope than expectation of changing minds, but this shit is getting real now:

Dear *****

On **/**/**, you responded to my [email//letter] regarding the proposal for UK to withdrawal from the European Union and concluded by saying that we are leaving on the 29th March and that we need to unite to make it a success. As you will be aware, this will not be happening on this date, so I am writing to you again to urge you to think seriously about the choices you are about to make and their effect on your constituents and the country.

Firstly, I would remind you that, having done nothing to meet the demands of myself and other constituents for a vote on the final deal, when the details became available, you have had the privilege of being able to consider the deal and vote on it twice in Parliament already, with another vote to come.

The agreement has twice been rejected decisively by the House. All available polling evidence shows that it is at least as unpopular among voters as it is among MPs, satisfying neither those of us who wish to remain in the European Union, or those who wish to leave. The government has negotiated for two years and has come back with a deal which does not preserve the advantages we enjoy as a member of the largest free market on the planet, or meet the promises of the leave campaigns to somehow replace this great deal with a better one. It is, by any reasonable standards, a failure.

The unpopularity of the deal aside, it also puts the UK in a materially weaker bargaining position in international trade negotiations, subjecting this country to pressures which endanger our National Health Service, food standards and employment rights.

What are the alternatives?

The UK could leave the EU without a deal, an outcome so catastrophic that contingency plans for what would amount to a state of civil emergency are being prepared (Operation Yellowhammer/Redfold) and the House of Commons have rightly rejected this as an option, although if no deal is agreed this is the default position.

Voters could have, and should have, been granted a referendum on the final deal, but the Government have failed to seek our informed consent on the terms of exit  and, having run down the clock, it is hard to see how this can now happen.

The only alternative which remains, if you are not to harm your constituents, is for Parliament to press for Article 50 to be revoked. This is not my preferred option, but we are left with no good choices, only damage limitation. You will be aware of the petition to revoke article 50, which is being signed at an unprecedented rate. Do not underestimate the anger and frustration of those who have been driven to add their names to it, having been denied a final say in the most important decision affecting their future, as the result of a marginal result in an advisory referendum, so tainted by disinformation, foreign interference, gerrymandering and criminal electoral fraud, that the result would have been voided, if the referendum had been binding.

Unlike some of the more vocal leave advocates, I am not threatening violence or civil unrest, but be assured, if the UK is taken out of the EU, either under the terms of the Prime Minister’s terrible deal, or a catastrophic no deal, millions like me will not rest until every politician who facilitated this avoidable national crisis, in defiance of clear evidence and explicit warnings, is voted out of office.

Please do not act under the mistaken belief that your constituents or the nation will ever to unite to make this botched deal a success.

Thank you for your time.

Yours sincerely

****

"Because they're morons"

Mark Blyth's take on the Brexit vote is harsh, bleak and and it isn't new. But it's as true now as it ever was.

Of course, the use of the phrase "morons" will provoke the usual tedious accusations about Remainer elitists sneering at the views of ordinary people. But if you listen, this is a more nuanced explanation of what happened and the "morons" in question include the UK's political and media elite who incubated the stupidity.

As for Mark himself, he didn't get where he is today because he belongs to some privileged elite. In his own words:

I was born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1967. I grew up in relative poverty, in a very real sense a “welfare kid”. Today I’m a professor at an Ivy League university in the USA. Probabilistically speaking, I am as an extreme example of intragenerational social mobility as you can find anywhere.

Now check out the first three minutes or so of this video (if I've done this right, it should start playing about 49' 40" in):

Wake me up...

... I'm having this really disturbing dream where Ukip have turned the whole UK into a creepily unfunny, racist 1970s sitcom and put Jim Davidson in charge of the Foreign Office:

UK government guide advises people being deported to Jamaica to fake Caribbean accent to avoid attention

Wait a minute ... that was no dream...

The Windrush scandal is Theresa May’s creation, borne of an innate inability to equate ‘immigrant’ with ‘person’. It’s a hefty accusation, I know, but it makes sense of almost everything she’s done since 2010. Lying about a cat; Go Home vans; subsuming Ukip; EU citizens as cards.

— James O'Brien (@mrjamesob) April 17, 2018

Welcome to my nightmare.

Ukip still alive, allegedly

As of today, Ukip's crowdfunding site is still showing only £620 raised of the £100,000 needed. But interim leader Gerrard Batten has been boasting that the Kippers have not only raised more than the £100,000 they were begging for, but that they've settled their £175,000 defamation bill by "other means."

Disappointing, if true.

Assuming it is, I wonder who's throwing money at these clowns? Presumably not the small grass roots donors the crowdfunding site was there to attract. The wonga is more likely to have come from a well-heeled source like Mayfair-based Growth Financial Services Ltd, who bunged the Kippers £154,000 in Q4 of 2017. Time, and the Electoral Commission, will tell.

If they're back, I seriously doubt that it's by popular demand.

"Insecurity is fantastic" revisited

The usual paranoia warning applies here ("Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"), but some things are so stupid that they look a lot like deliberate sabotage:

One disconcerting possibility is that figures such as Fox and Rees-Mogg might be willing to believe the dismal economic forecasts, but look on them as an attraction.

This isn’t as implausible as it may sound. Since the 1960s, conservatism has been defined partly by a greater willingness to inflict harm, especially in the English-speaking world. The logic is that the augmentation of the postwar welfare state by the moral pluralism of the 1960s produced an acute problem of ‘moral hazard’, whereby benign policies ended up being taken for granted and abused. Once people believe things can be had for free and take pleasure in abundance, there is a risk of idleness and hedonism.

Remember, Peter Hargreaves, the stockbroker who spent £3.2 million on funding Leave.EU, said this in an unguarded moment before the referendum:

...a vote to leave would create uncertainty in the UK.

 But he argued that was what the country needed, saying it "would be the biggest stimulus to get our butts in gear that we have ever had".

"It will be like Dunkirk again," he said. "We will get out there and we will be become incredibly successful because we will be insecure again. And insecurity is fantastic."

Are they just trying to "take back control" in an incredibly inefficient way? Or are they deliberately conspiring to make our lives insecure in a very efficient way?

WTF, PFI?

When Carillon collapsed with a mighty clang, it prompted some people to have second thoughts about the wisdom of Private Finance Initiative contracts. Look at the original thinking behind PFI and you start to wonder why anybody ever had first thoughts about this way of doing things:

...why did we ever enter PFI contracts in the first place? The answer is provided on page 11 of the NAO report: PFI is off-balance sheet for national accounts purposes, which means it “results in lower recorded levels of government debt and public spending in the short term”.

The problem was that Serious People believed public spending and government debt in the UK were dangerously, unsustainably high.* They lay awake at night worrying about the terrible debts future generations would inherit, if we frittered their birthright away on fripperies like schools, roads and hospitals. What did they do about this alleged existential, intergenerational threat?

No worries - they had a cunning plan. Hide the up-front costs, so it looked as if they weren't spending the money they really were spending, then saddle future generations with the cost of running and maintaining this off-balance-sheet infrastructure, as well as handing over a massive wodge of public money in rent to a bunch of private companies who'll be billing our kids and their kids, long after the Serious People have moved on, their reputation for prudent management of the public finances intact.

So Serious People solved the perceived problem of handing whopping debts on to the next generation by making current spending seem to disappear, through the magic of creative accounting, then ... er ... handing whopping debts on to the next generation.

That's so mental, it's almost impressive.




*Plenty of people have argued convincingly that the idea of runaway public spending was wasn't true when the notion of PFI was first dreamed up and still isn't true.

Corbyn: "I'm king of the world!" (spoiler: iceberg ahead)

Imagine that it's close to midnight on 14 April 1912 and we're on the bridge of the RMS Titanic. Watchers in the crows' nest have just spotted an iceberg ahead. What should we do?

There are two schools of thought.* Mister Barlow thinks that our top priority is to do everything possible to change course and speed, during our short remaining window of time, so that the ship can either avoid the berg, or try to hit slowly, at a speed and angle which gives us some chance of not sinking.

Mister Jones objects that while everybody's obsessing about the iceberg, conditions aboard the Titanic are unacceptable; the working poor are crammed into cramped, airless quarters in steerage, while the rich and powerful lounge about in their sumptuous staterooms, being waited on hand and foot, when not stuffing their faces with turtle soup and lobster at the Captain's table. Mister Jones is a fan of First Mate Corbyn's vision of something better, a Titanic that works for everyone.

Now I don't think Mister Jones is wrong. The massive levels of unfairness and inequality are wrong, bad and need fixing. But - forgive me if I'm being be a single-issue iceberg bore here - the iceberg is dead ahead, the time left for avoiding action is short, and if we hit and sink, who do you think will be first in the queue for the limited number of lifeboats (hint; it's probably not going to be the poor devils in steerage)? For the moment, I think that the pressing problem of iceberg avoidance deserves to occupy the top left quadrant of the Eisenhower decision grid.

That was my take on the "What - if anything - should progressives do about Brexit" debate, as argued by Owen Jones and Nick Barlow.

Credit to Boris Johnson for first suggesting the Titanic analogy.

*Of course, there are other courses of action, although the one being urged on Captain May by her senior officers ("Shut your eyes, full steam ahead and just keep on saying that we're definitely going to win the Blue Riband"), doesn't really involve enough neurological activity to qualify as a school of thought.

"We're going to build a wall and Ireland is going to pay."

Just when you thought that nobody could possibly out-stupid the Brexiteering eejits in the May government, Labour's Kate Hoey says "Hold my Guinness" and goes full Trump.

What took him so long?

Crypto-fascist strongman stiffs his allies, cuts deal with fellow crypto-fascist strongman.

With a sort of tragic inevitabilty,  the only good thing to come out of the Syrian tragedy is being strangled at birth.

Remember this flag. It's what hope used to look like.

Conservative home and away

Daniel Hannan raised a few eyebrows this week when he used a Consevative Home article to vent about his fellow Brexiteer, Arron Banks. According to Hannan, it was the official campaign, Vote Leave, wot won it. In contrast, Hannan called the Arron Banks-funded Leave.EU campaign a "hapless and hopeless" "wrecking operation" which did nothing to help the Leavers win, but only functioned "as a vehicle to promote himself [Arron Banks] and Nigel Farage."

There's a perfectly rational reason for Hannan's attack. The media are delving into where Banks got the money that propped up Ukip and, along with the Electoral Commission, are looking at allegations  that officially separate pro-Brexit campaign groups illicitly colluded to share money and resources in order to breach campaign funding limits. The main reason for the article is to distance Hannan and his fellow Vote Leave Tory Brexiteers from the dodgy-looking geezers of Ukip and Leave.EU.

"There have been technical investigations into both Leave and Remain on compliance issues. But it’s Banks who is attracting the most fevered speculation about where his money came from. No proof of wrongdoing has been found, but the lurid nature of the accusation is being used to suggest that Leave won improperly.

To repeat, Banks’s outfit was not Vote Leave, or even an ally of Vote Leave...

...As far as the Electoral Commission’s investigation goes, Banks is as entitled as anyone else to the presumption of innocence. Being a boastful, belligerent man-child doesn’t make you a Russian agent."

In other words:

"You can't prove he did anything (we hope), but even if you find out that he did do something, he's got nothing to do with us. Move along, nothing to see here." 

So far, so Mandy Rice-Davis.

But the string of insults about the "hapless and hopeless" campaigning of the "boastful, belligerent man-child" reminds us that this is deeply personal, too. It's also the latest round in a long and bitter feud of easily-bruised egos taking place in the exclusive bubble inhabited by millionaire political donors and the politicians who court them. It's been going on at least since Banks stopped giving money to the Conservatives and started funding Ukip, but really came to a head when William Hague said that he'd "never heard" of the former Tory donor, causing Banks to increase his donation to Ukip from £100,00 to £1 million out of spite, or wounded self-importance.  For the careerists in the Conservative family, the political is personal.

It's a bit like watching members of a highly dysfunctional family plotting and squabbling over which one of them is going to inherit the family house. Only they're all so intent on making sure that no other sibling gets the house that none have noticed that the house itself is on fire. From the perspective of an observer on the other side of the pond, the flames engulfing the family mansion are only too obvious:

"The world recently commemorated the centennial of the Russian Revolution, which resulted from the flagrant incompetence of that country’s ruling class in confronting a moment of overwhelming national crisis. The barricades are not yet out in the streets of modern-day London, but a certain sense of déjà vu is appropriate. At the least, we are likely witnessing the slow-motion suicide of the Conservative Party, and, conceivably, of British conservatism more broadly defined.

In the British case, the crisis involves the nation’s referendum vote in June 2016 to withdraw from the European Union. Opinions may differ about the virtues of Brexit as an idea—I opposed it—but once it was decided, most everyone agreed that the process of extraction had to be implemented with great care and single-minded dedication. The actual response of the Conservative government has been deplorable to the point of unforgivable—inept, slipshod, insouciant, and ignorant of even the basic realities of law and process."

Philip Jenkins, writing for The American Conservative, was just getting into his stride there. Just wait until he gets down to the nitty-gritty of the "victory" Vote Leave and Leave.EU are both claiming credit for:

"After the referendum, Theresa May emerged as prime minister with a firm commitment to the principle “Brexit means Brexit.” Accordingly, she chose leading Brexit campaigners for key positions, including Boris Johnson as foreign secretary and David Davis as head of the new department in charge of exiting the European Union (DExEU) and chief negotiator of withdrawal. Liam Fox carries responsibility for international trade, which includes negotiating new agreements outside the old EU framework.

Painfully early, it became apparent that none of this Gang of Four had a clue of what they talking about in relation to Europe, nor did they understand the basic principles by which the EU worked. It is not so much that they approached the key issues wrongly—they did not even perceive them as issues. Throughout the referendum campaign, Brexiteers had trivialized the question of future relationships with the EU, suggesting that these would easily be decided in high-level summits within weeks rather than years. There was therefore not the slightest need to prepare detailed negotiating principles. As Johnson explicitly stated, the new British relationship with Europe would be exactly what it was at present, although omitting some of the features he found unpalatable, such as unrestricted EU immigration.

When Britain invoked Article 50, no government figure grasped the implications. Until quite recently, Johnson and Davis mocked the notion that Britain might have to pay a penny for the divorce bill. (The British government is now admitting a liability of some tens of billions, a sum that will definitely increase.) When the reborn Irish Question finally surfaced in their minds, Davis presented a vision of an invisible border made possible by as-yet undeveloped high technology, a prospect that has been commonly derided as magical thinking. Oh, and remember those vast new trading empires outside Europe, with all those lucrative deals being signed almost immediately? There’s no sign of any movement in that direction."

Come to think of it, my analogy of a dysfunctional family squabbling over the inheritance was altogether too kind. Vote Leave and Leave.EU arguing about who won the referendum are more like a pair of arsonists both wanting all the credit for burning down the house. "It would never have happened without me!", boasts box of matches guy. "But he was hapless and hopeless!" counters can of paraffin guy, "I was the one who did all the heavy lifting!" While all around, law-abiding folk shake their heads and wonder how anybody can be so thoughtlessly delinquent as to claim credit for replacing a perfectly good house with a useless pile of blackened, smouldering timbers.

Blue planet in crisis

Doubts around Theresa May’s leadership trigger sharp falls in Sterling: sea turtles "concerned."

Probably just another headline/image pairing mismatch by Google News's algorithm, although I wouldn't be entirely surprised to hear that even marine reptiles in the far-off Pacific are shaking their scaly heads in disbelief at the sheer magnitude of the British government's omnishambolic implosion.

Conservation of Moggmentum

"Any [cartoon] body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation... At this point, the familiar principle of 32 feet per second per second takes over."

Cartoon physics doesn’t work so well in the real world, although this doesn't stop some people trying.

Now competing in the Wile E. Coyote Memorial 200m Thin Air Dash are Jacob "Not you, Jacob" Rees-Mogg and his fellow Brextremists.

Just trigger Article 50 as quickly as possible, keep running frantically towards the cliff edge and, whatever you do, DON'T LOOK DOWN!!!

If you believe hard enough, your surging Moggmentum will carry you across the yawning chasm of your total lack of foresight and preparation. Gravity can't touch you!

When it comes to having a plan, that really is all, folks!


Once again, this stunt should only performed by trained two-dimensional cartoon characters, so please don't try it at home. This blog shall not be liable for any loss of credibility or economic damage.

Experts agree: no-deal Brexit catastrophe now completely impossible/inevitable

Depending on who you believe, the British government has now reached the cliff edge and either stepped back, or  maybe carried on walking into thin air.

The uncertainty's a tad worrying. Good job nothing important rests on the outcome...

When I said "enemy" I meant "friends", obvs

For Christ's sake,  Philip, it's Boris who's in charge of the diplomacy! Just remember that and everything will be fine...

Flagellation for the nation

If you are of a nervous disposition, look away now. If you're still with me, prepare to stare into the abyss.

I used to think that most of the probable outcomes of Brexit ranged from bad to very bad, but I was holding on to one consoling thought. I thought that at least most of the people behind Brexit shared some political values that I could recognise.

I might disagree with Leave voters about means, but I kind of assumed that we were all working towards the same ends. I thought that the general goal of political change was to let as many people as possible thrive, prosper and enjoy more opportunities than they had under the status quo. Proponents of any change should at least believe that the change will make things better than they were before. That, I thought, was a bare minimum requirement.

I didn't believe that leaving the EU would make things better, which is why I voted Remain. Other people voted Leave. I disagreed with them, but I thought that at least that they sincerely believed that leaving would make things better and that nobody would stick with the idea if they started to think that leaving would actually make things worse.

How wrong I was. There are people who apparently believe that the effects of leaving will be catastrophic,  but that we still need to go ahead, because prosperity has made us spoiled and weak. Leavers who are actually looking forward to a ten year recession because it will make the UK population less "frivolous. "

I'm not sure what you'd call a philosophy of disciplining the population by deliberately engineering hardship and struggle - no merely political label covers it half so well as the word "horrific. " This long excerpt is probably as much as most people can stomach, but the brave, or masochistic, can read the whole thing here:

In the first year or so we are going to lose a lot of manufacturing. Virtually all JIT export manufacturing will fold inside a year. Initially we will see food prices plummet but this won't last. Domestic agriculture won't be able to compete and we'll see a gradual decline of UK production. UK meats will be premium produce and no longer affordable to most.

Once food importers have crushed all UK competition they will gradually raise their prices, simply because they can. Meanwhile wages will stay depressed and because of the collapse of disposable income and availability of staff, we can probably expect the service sector to take a big hit thus eliminating all the jobs that might provide a supplementary income.

Across the board we will see prices rising. There will be some serendipitous benefits but nothing that offsets the mass job losses. We will see a lot of foreign investment dry up and banking services will move to the EU. Dublin and Frankfurt. I expect that house prices will start to fall, but that's not going to do anyone any favours in the short to mid term.

Since a lot of freight will no longer be able to go through Calais we can expect a lot more use of the port at Hull so we may see an expansion in distribution centres in the North.

All in all we are looking at serious austerity as it will take a few years at least to rebuild our trade relations with third countries. If we go down the path of unilateral trade liberalisation then we will probably find it hard to strike new deals.

Meanwhile, since tax receipts will be way down we can expect major cuts to the forces and a number of Army redundancies. I expect to see RAF capability cut by a third. Soon enough it will become apparent that cuts to defence cannot go further so we can expect another round of cuts to council services. They will probably raise council tax to cope with it.

After years of the left bleating about austerity they are about to find out what it actually means. Britain is about to become a much more expensive pace to live. It will cause a spike in crime...

...Eventually things will settle down and we will get used to the new order of things. My gut instinct tells me that culturally it will be a vast improvement on the status quo. There will be more reasons to cooperate and more need to congregate. I expect to see a cultural revolution where young people actually start doing surprising and reckless things again rather than becoming tedious hipsters drinking energy drinks in pop-up cereal bar book shops or whatever it is they do these days. We'll be back to the days when students had to be frugal and from their resourcefulness manage to produce interesting things and events...

...Effectively we are looking at a ten year recession. Nothing ever experienced by those under 50. Admittedly this is not the Brexit I was gunning for. I wanted a negotiated settlement to maintain the single market so that we did not have to be substantially poorer, but, in a lot of ways I actually prefer this to the prospect of maintaining the 2015 status quo with ever degraded politics with increasingly less connection to each other.

I'm of the view that in recent years people have become increasingly spoiled and self-indulgent, inventing psychological problems for themselves in the absence of any real challenges or imperatives to grow as people. I have always primarily thought Brexit would be a reboot on British politics and culture. In a lot of ways it will bring back much of what is missing. A little austerity might very well make us less frivolous.

My emphasis.  I'm pretty sure that a lot of people in the UK didn’t have a very clear idea what they were voting for last June. But I'm damn sure it wasn't for this.

Oh, and by the way, screw you, Pete North and screw your "cultural revolution" and screw your "new order of things", you ideologically-addled maniac.

Via

UK's future now as strong and stable as Theresa May

Ahem. While you were cringing in sympathy / laughing your socks off at the Conservatives' conference malfunction, this was happening:

The Trump administration has joined a group of countries objecting to a deal between the UK and EU to divide valuable agricultural import quotas, in a sign of how the US and others plan to use Brexit to force the UK to further open its sensitive market for farm products.

President Donald Trump has been one of the most prominent international backers of Brexit and has vowed to quickly negotiate a “beautiful trade deal” with the UK after it leaves the EU. But his administration’s objection to a preliminary plan, agreed to by Brussels and London over how to split the EU’s existing “tariff rate quotas” under World Trade Organisation rules after the UK, assumes its own WTO obligations following Brexit illustrates how Washington is likely to drive a hard bargain.

It also undermines efforts by the May government in London this week to portray the WTO deal with the EU as a significant win, something made doubly painful by Mr Trump’s past backing of Brexit. 

Looking on the bright side, at least I can now just keep on recycling the same old meme for ever and ever and it'll never be out of date...

This is also fine.

Life in the heroically stupid UK

I miss living in a country where even people in authority just occasionally had a sense of proportion, pragamatism and even humour. But nowadays, the very model of a modern British citizen is apparently the aggressively paranoid, mirthless jobsworth and "only obeying orders", no matter how ridiculous, is the the mark of a true British hero:

The chief constable of Sussex Police has labelled his staff “everyday heroes” for using the UK's Terrorism Act to arrest a photographer taking pictures of Hove Town Hall.

Such mindless obedience to arbitrary authority has no place in a sane society, but it is vital to governing an inmate-run  madhouse where only a bizarre form of circular doublethink can make sense of the ruling ideology:

What is very much still relevant is that the same hermetically-sealed, evidence-proof and argument-proof logic now drives government policy... Each time reality demolishes one of their claims (the most ubiquitous, perhaps, and the most absurd, certainly, being that German car makers would ensure a good deal in double quick time) the Brexiters do not acknowledge that they were wrong, but move on to a harder position. So, first, we can somehow be in the single market but with no strings attached. That’s proved wrong. So it will be a trade deal. Now that that is looking increasingly difficult they move to saying that no deal would be perfectly fine. And, in any case, it’s all the EU’s fault and ‘just goes to prove’ that we are right to leave. There’s no way out of this kind of thinking. It is completely circular and unfalsifiable.

There is no imaginable event that could shake it. Suppose the UK gets a great deal? It proves we were right to leave! Suppose we don’t? It proves we were right to leave!

Terrifying stupidity is the new normal.

Brexit - mistake, enemy action, or delusion?

When Nigel Farage tripped down the steps of the Ecuadorian embassy – a visit that he did not expect to be photographed or documented – a beam of light was shone on a previously hidden world: a political alignment between WikiLeaks’ ideology, Ukip’s ideology and Trump’s ideology that is not necessarily just an affinity. It is also, potentially, a channel of communication.

David Golumbia, an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in the US who has studied WikiLeaks, describes it as “the moment when the lines suddenly become visible”. He says: “It was like the picture suddenly came into focus. There is this worldwide, rightwing, nationalistic movement that is counter to the EU, and this is present in the US and Europe and Russia, and we are just starting to understand how they do all seem to be in communication and co-ordination with each other.”

Carole Cadwalladr, writing in the Graun.

If you were an agent for a hostile power actively trying to inflict massive damage on the UK and the EU, then covertly promoting Brexit would certainly have helped you to do just that. The idea that Brexit was a foreign conspiracy has a vague plausibility, but it's not that probable, at least if you calm down a bit and apply Hanlon's razor to the dramatic idea that the Brexit omnishambles is the result of active subversion, rather than just a catastrophically bad decision.

But the idea of subversion by foreign powers still looks more likely than the official government delusion that, if we all just shut up, get behind Brexit and wish hard enough, we'll magically find ourselves in a wonderful land of freedom and opportunity where foreigners will fall over themselves in their rush to capitulate to our every demand.

If you still believe that one, just keep your head still while I measure you up for a stylish tinfoil hat.

Fifty shades of May

Joy unconfined, hip, hip hooray!
It's British independence day!
O, masochistic isles UK,
Unite and through your ball gags say,
"Thank you, thank you, Mistress May!"

We're glad you were so quick and nifty,
Invoking Article number fifty,
Though your reasoning was shifty,
The chancellor has got your drift, he
knows our future's mean and thrifty.

If it hadn't been for you,
We wouldn't have our Empire Two,
To show those foreigners who's who,
Nor ten years more of crisis, too,
You spoil us, Tess, you really do!

Let me peel you a fresh grape!
To thank you for the new red tape,
And saving us from foreign rape,
Not to mention Johnson's jape,
(Bananas of non-bendy shape).

We're glad we won't be free to move,
It will be worth it to reprove,
The migrant hordes we don't approve.
We're so excited now that you've,
Found some rights you can remove.

So just stop thinking and believe,
Those big employers will not leave,
Those Brexiters would not deceive,
More money than you can conceive,
Will save the NHS, don't grieve!

To get a deal is just child's play,
No matter what the experts say,
We'll force them to see things our way,
Or cause a very loud affray,
We are not worthy, Mistress May!

A dog's breakfast is is for life, not just for Christmas

At the American Historical Association annual meeting this year, I ended a pleasant conversation with a UK-resident friend of mine, who said in parting he’d be happy enough to trade Brexit for Trump. I hadn’t time to inquire after his logic, so I leave it to you to decide whether you would do likewise.

Maybe it's not as obvious as I'd thought but, to me, the logic is quite straightforward:

• failing a Trumpist one-party coup, Americans are stuck with Trump for four years max, before getting their chance to fire the bum
• if Mrs May isn't stopped from going through with Brexit, it's just going to stick around, like an unflushable turd. However bad it gets, we Brits are stuck with it for ever.*

Some poor choices are hard to reverse...

 *OK, nothing's "for ever", but a generation-long omnishambles with no bearable alternative is quite bad enough.