Like a drunk, Brexit staggers on without a sense of destination or urgency, with all the sorrows implicit in the behaviour fully on view and yet wholly unacknowledged by those with any capacity to change the situation.
The government has not moved red lines when it says it has.
Labour still demands solutions that change little and alienate many.
Parliament passed an almost meaningless Act that requires very little, as it turned out, yesterday.
And May criss-crosses Europe to avoid any real decision being taken.
At some time it will be appreciated that, like alcohol will the drunk, so Brexit will kill the country. And the only way to stop that happening is to give up Brexit altogether.
We may need 12 steps to recover from this folly.
We will regret forever the time that this issue dominated life.
Its legacy cannot be erased from our lives.
We will forever have to remind ourselves that we tried Brexit and must never go there again.
And we have to appreciate that this attempt at self-harm must be over.
But as we have not done that yet then maybe, just maybe, the EU needs to give us a few more weeks, and an EU election, to appreciate the reality of our condition.
That, though, is the only reason I can see for an extension in the state we are in.
This is so bad.
And it could get worse.
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Firstly, the EU needs to ramp up its view (and rhetoric) that it cannot abandon its EU citizens in the UK – including Ireland. It must take the view that it has some sort of responsibility for them (me) and reach out even more.
Labour needs to stop bleating about those MPs who were in Leave areas and who are scared of losing the next election. If Labour cannot do this, then it is no better than the Tory party who also manifestly put party before country (it’s called party-ocracy – where political parties become inward looking and where the electorate are forgotten). Labour must get behind another referendumb although I’d rather just see revocation now.
We need a year long extension (at least) and the EU just needs to keep offering it again and again and again until thick Theresa gets it. These short extensions are a joke.
The intransigence though has become instructive. I would have been OK with a BREXIT that took us out of the political sphere but left us with the trade side fully intact but basically if we cannot agree how to do it, it must be stopped – terminated – because we simple cannot resolve the issue. So I agree that A50 should be revoked forthwith.
BREXIT: It cannot be. Good!
As for what happens next…………..
If there was an airlift out of the UK to a place of your choice in Europe offered by the EU I would take it. Drop me off in Berlin please. Failing that, somewhere in Scotland. Or Scandinavia.
As things stand, anywhere but here. Long term – post A50 revocation…………
Sometimes its feels like you are being swept along by lemmings. The only way to stop the lemmings from massing and jumping over the cliff is to get them back to living and reform the current State into the Supportive Investment State (SIS) and address the short comings that have led people to become angry in the first place. This is what we – the nation needs – a Big SIS!!
If the British people see their living standards and opportunities grow, their cities and rivers cleaned up, their elderly folk looked after properly, their children educated, their health service working, more and cheaper housing, exciting projects like carbon reduction in cars and trains then I think BREXIT will be forgotten eventually and looked upon with embarrassment – a time where we all lost our heads and became silly-billies. Something that we can laugh over and recall at the pub one day because inequality will have been reduced.
But if we do not do these things, BREXIT will fester and fester for years, occasionally breaking out with dire consequences.
Revoke I say! We have tried; and it cannot be. It cannot.
‘PSR
“Sometimes its feels like you are being swept along by lemmings. ”
I guess this is what many people felt like in the run-up to the two world wars. Mass insanity taking us all where no one wants to go except a few headbangers bewitched by a fantasy.
I fear that a short extension would not be enough to allow the mature reconsideration that is required. It is too easy for the malign, the insane and the ill-informed to dominate the news over such a period.
What the UK really needs is A Nice Cup of Tea: a lengthy (at least a year) and relaxed sit-down to allow passions to cool, information to be shared, discussions to be conducted with civility. Branding it as A Nice Cup of Tea might appeal to Britons’ sense of self and might thus help acceptability, but I’m not sure that anyone has the credibility to declare Nice Cup of Tea year and have it accepted by all. There is one exception: were HM the Q to suspend parliament, and all A50 activity, and ask her subjects to have a Nice Cup of Tea, opponents would find it difficult to resist. I don’t expect that to happen, though, even if the “constitutional” lawyers accepted the idea.
bjg
A great idea
But no one trusts the Tories in Europe
Some interesting points in the link below regarding options if Scotland had voted Yes in 2014, some clearly applicable to Brexit. The idea of relying solely on an ill informed and largely subjective protest Brexit referendum, dominated by misleading slogans, is clearly ridiculous. Ideally the referendum should have been clearer about the real consequences, but failing that, the idea of having a second and more objective referendum, once the consequences had become clearer, is an obvious solution to only having had an indicative referendum.
‘One argument is that there could be a need for a second referendum, either in Scotland or the UK, to approve the terms agreed in the course of negotiations’.
https://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/research/scotland-the-referendum-and-independence/introduction/
And after this next extension, another, and then another. Brexit cannot be delivered. There’s no way to do it not involving years, decades, centuries of uncomfortable decision-making, decisions which will all be overturned by time as the EU evolves making them irrelevant, leaving us still solidly in it. Brexit isn’t coming. Godot will be arriving before Brexit. Forget it. Move on.
The EU isn’t some kind of perfect entity – it is not unreasonable to examine if it is in our best interests to continue to be a member.
But the question came at an odd time. And the actions of politicians and government have been so detrimental, it is their vision of Brexit that is toxic and harmful to the country. It is the media’s vision of Brexit that is toxic and harmful to the country (-ies).
So many politicians appear to believe that they can carry on talking about something and it will miraculously happen. They appear to have lost the ability to run a country. They did nothing to enable a smooth transition. Empty hollow words.
Living off the fat of arms trade, money markets, tax havens, Scotland’s oil, they have become complacent and out of touch with reality. So far away out of touch with reality they are a vague sketch moving through the landscape leaving devastation in their wake. Social devastation, political devastation and economic devastation. The security services should have been taking action to prevent this, it’s their job after all, but they do nothing. Complicit? Politicised? Bought out? The constitution allows us no protections.
Westminster must be one of the worst examples of democracy in our age, and this is what happens when we continue to prop up this system. Compliant and pandering we have allowed the hallowed halls of pomp and circumstance to feed itself into a frenzy of disgusting overindulgence, disgusting overconfidence in their own worth, and disgusting denigration of ‘other’.
The politicians will never admit they caused this, all of them, the Lords too, because none of them are held accountable. They are law-makers and make the law to protect themselves. It has always been a farce, but the current mob are just taking the piss.
I have always hated Westminster – what it stands for, and in how it has treated Scotland and its representatives (real ones, few as they were in the past, not the lackies and hangers on) – Scotland needs rid of this imposed toxic rule. If only Scotland had a neat get-out clause like article 50, maybe the Reserved matters would not have been quite so reserved. Maybe Scotland would have been treated equally, like the uk was in the EU, more than equally there even. Even with an overwhelming vote for remain in a second EU referendum, I have doubts there will be much trust or good feeling towards the uk now – not with the constitutional set up remaining the same anyway.
Contrary says:
“The constitution allows us no protections.”
Strictly speaking I’m led to believe we have no constitution.
That’s what Charter 88 was all about remedying. By my reckoning that’s about 40 years ago. And we’re still in a quagmire.
Contrary, I register your utter disgust with where we are and the failure of our political pygmies. (Can I say Pygmies in these days of PC ? Or is it racist (?). …but you know what I mean.)
I remember Charter 88….
I signed up….in 88
Charter 88? I am not sure I know anything about that, or remember it anyway…
No written constitution anyway, its all worked by precedent and faeries I think. We don’t need one because we are all so very civilised and reasonable…
(Pygmies,,, not sure about the PC implications there either!)
I think that we are living in a time when a lot of Neo-liberal chickens are coming home to roost – Neo-liberalism has always threatened to unravel whatever social fabric had been knitted in the immediate post second world war period and now we are in the end game.
We could call it ‘The Great Social Unravelling’
Parliament was/is a liberal concept – it is based on the premise that reasonable men and woman would run it and the checks and balances were sufficient for this presupposed rationality.
Those checks and balances however – much like those in the mathematical models of our financial institutions – have been broken through a long time ago since Neo-liberalism came to prominence as an answer to our economic problems. In finance it is short term greed that has broken the system; in Parliament is political extremism that has broken it in the form of BREXIT and Leave.
There has been nothing reasonable about Thatcherism that I can see – its first iteration in the late 70’s and the post 2010 version whose yolk we have lived under for far too long.
I mean, our schools are going online to raise money to make up for lost funding! What else can you say to that? The glue is becoming unstuck. That glue was macro finance and these very very stupid Tories do not get it. Like Victorian quack doctors, they will bleed the country dry.
All we can do now is see this period out and then be ready for deeper reforms. I do not know when they will appear but I will say something that I’m hearing everywhere at the moment and its ‘We can’t keep going on like this’.
Pilgrim Slight Return says:
“I think that we are living in a time when a lot of Neo-liberal chickens are coming home to roost ”
Hmmmm…. chickens ? A turkey more like.
The reforms will begin to appear when the beneficiaries of bleeding the country realise that there’s no blood left. Or that enough of us are no longer prepared to be donors.
It may not happen soon. The ‘credit rating’ is a powerful tool to manipulate the masses. It’s not until you don’t have one that the realisation dawns that it was never of any real value in the first place. 🙂
A good analogy, the alcoholic one.
We can start by staying away from harm, for a bit, for now.
Like for an alcoholic though, it won’t be enough to try and stay away from the drug. It’ll be necessary to dig out the roots of this debilitating sickness.
The causes of it. Deep, deep rooted in all areas of life here.
So much needs to be fixed, Brexit is like a sick liver needing a transplant before it can produce healthy blood again. What a mess.
Contrary says that the UK has no written constitution. In fact there is a reasonably good summary of it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mornington_Crescent_(game)
bjg
@bjg
Lol.