Simon Jenkins is a most irritating columnist, sometimes close to repugnant, and other times so sensible. And he writes well. Yesterday he was talking sense on Brexit:
As the forces of soft Brexit prepare for the end game, mad Brexit is what cabinet Brexiters are seeking to sanitise, at a staggering cost of a reported £3bn in administration alone. Raab is implying that all will be well with no deal, so long as private businesses tool up to carry the bureaucratic burden. Like Rees-Mogg, he believes they should bear the short-term cost as it is supposedly to the nation's long-term advantage. It's a dystopian, Blade Runner Brexit.
There was a case for Brexit to traumatise the politics of a hesitant and ill-led European community. There was no case to destroy the vitality of a common market that had served Britain well for decades. There is no other Brexit but soft. May must seize control of her party and lead it in that direction.
But just because it makes sense does not mean it will happen.
I happen to now think May is the best Tory prime minister we could have at present. That does not say a lot. And it does not mean that I think she will take control and force her party in the right direction. In fact, I have no such confidence at all. She may be as mad as the rest of them.
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I read this too.
This man was telling Guardian readers not so long that they should not worry and calamity will be averted.
Now he talks in darker tones and he has got me worried because being a Tory he can maybe read what is going on in that shower of merde better than me. He has me worried, no doubt about that.
The Tory party seems to be full of reckless self interested people as Aeron Davis alludes in his book Reckless Opportunists.
May’s recklessness can attributed to her wanting to be PM and trying to keep her post and the Tories together. All at the cost to her country.
May is just as mad.
My instinct is that she is aiming for a last minute take it or leave it soft brexit deal that she can present to her party with the message that it’s this or Corbyn as PM.
What breaks my heart is how this desperate negotiating tactic makes the UK look in the eyes of the world: a delusional people who really shouldn’t be removing the EU safety belt while the car is still moving.
Maybe May is playing a blinder. Maybe she is deliberately messing up the whole Brexit process so badly that there will be popular clamour for a ‘people’s vote’ resulting a withdrawal of the Article 50 notification.
Evidence supporting the idea:
1. We know she voted remain and she might still wish the people had done so too.
2. Nobody could have messed it up this badly by accident.
Or maybe I should just stop dreaming.
I fear you are dreaming…
They could have been this bad
Couldn’t agree more. I’m currently writing on the madness of rabble-rouser and mob – critique is very old and may even include crude democracies being set up by the Persian Empire as a form of sham participative management. May is a serial bungler, not quite as thuggish as Trump. We don’t just get them in politics and can see them in various regulatory bodies and ‘leading’ universities and firms. There has to be a better electoral beauty contest than one with Theresa dancing like a robot in need of a lube service. Does she know who used terms like ‘ze vill of zee people’ and ‘streng und staable’ most in recent history?
We are supposed to have monitory democracy these days. I would expect to hear sensible material in a questioning media. Instead, everything centres on a fringe and blather I could only get undergraduates to role play behind extremist masks, to distance themselves from content. Answers are difficult to start because the real status quo relies so much on prejudice and a democratic epistemology copied from known mistakes 2,500 years back. I prefer skilled-incompetence to madness, though the current system and our votaries are immoral against criteria of a green morality. Edward Flattau’s ‘Green Morality’ is a start. By the time Lord Snooty is in power it will be illegal to have a copy.
My overall take is that there’s probably some method in the madness. Confronted with a completely unexpected referendum result the Tory strategists at the heart of government came up with an end-game in which hostility towards the EU is ratcheted to the point when whatever is or isn’t negotiated is seen as a hard-fought victory for the nation.
They’re hoping (and doubtless praying) that this coupled with some popularist domestic policies (concessions) and the demonisation of Corbyn will ensure them election victory in 2022. It’s a strategy that might well work for them.
But who knows? Maybe it’s all reactive policy-making on the hoof. There’s quite a good article in Politico that attempts to unpack the Tory tribal agenda – https://www.politico.eu/article/brexit-8-tory-tribes-conservative-party.
I said a few weeks ago that the financial elites will bend to the Maybot’s wishes to avoid a Corbyn premiership. She will be hailed as the conquering hero, will win a Common’s vote with the help of the PLP and go on to win the next two general elections. Austerity will be the permanent norm. Of course the next financial crash should change everything and it would be preferable for it to happen on her watch. Everything depends on Labour getting on board with MME and shifting the Overton Window. Not a time for the faint hearted. Courageous Opposition could lead to the Courageous State. ( apologies – I’ve already moved to Modern MacroEconomics)
Interestingly the Tory and Labour No Dealers are putting all their eggs in the WTO basket but Donald Trump declares it’s a corrupt organisation out to “screw” the United States. Of course, the argument can be extended to one in which it’s really global corporations who’ve corrupted the WTO in order to “screw” all countries. Of course as a capitalist who’s built up a massive corporation it’s hard for Donald Trump not to be ambiguous on this let alone recognise it as a fundamental underlying truth. The UK too seems to be particularly cursed with political leaders who don’t really understand how things work!
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/30/trump-world-trade-organization-tariffs-stock-market
You could not make it up
Yet despite of dishing the WTO, the USA wins 90% of its WTO cases. Who knew?
@ Marcus
It’s this big one that sticks in Trump’s craw. The WTO washing its hands of currency manipulation on the grounds its not within its remit despite it being very obvious to anyone with half a brain that price and a country’s currency value on both sides of the trade is a very important factor affecting demand:-
https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1072&context=lps_clacp
The only thing that makes sense is for her to test her celebrated ‘will of the people’ once more, now that the people are better informed on the whole sorry business. It should also get her out of the mess she is in.
@Venetia
The only thing that makes sense is for “Treason ” May To heed the advice that Cromwell gave to Parliament all those years ago…. and act upon it.