the day after the deadline: can the union survive brexit and other deep questions

DD is also doing a lot of "I can't hear the question" at that select committee. Is he actually hard of hearing or pretending to be so to buy time because he does it at almost every question or interjection - at one point he upbraids Seema Malhotra for not giving him the exact date she is trying to tie down when she has already given it to him twice.

Davis won't resign or get the sack, and we'll have to suck it up.

Isn't this wonderful?

This interview will colour everything that happens from now on. A town loses its car factory and biggest employer? They chose to leave the customs union without an analysis of the economic impact. Food prices start spiralling and people slip further into poverty? They chose to leave the customs union without an analysis of the economic impact. Several British airlines find their European flights effectively grounded? They chose to leave the customs union without an analysis of the economic impact.

If nothing else he should be fired for being stupid enough to have admitted it.

the transcript as reported by the Guardian:

Benn: So, just to be clear, has the government undertaken any impact assessments on the implications of leaving the EU for different sectors [of the economy]

Davis: Not in sectors. The Treasury, of course, has got an OBR forecast which has an implication, although even that is pretty crude ... There is no systematic impact assessment.

Benn: So the answer to the question is no. So the government hasn’t undertaken any impact assessments of implications of leaving the EU for different sectors of the British economy.

Davis: No.

Benn: So there isn’t one, for example, on the automatic sector?

Davis: Not that I’m aware of, no.

Benn: Is there one on aerospace?

Davis: Not that I’m aware of.

Benn: One on financial services?

Davis: I think the answer is going to be no to all of them.

Davis won't resign or get the sack, and we'll have to suck it up.

Isn't this wonderful?

i'd say there's a p big chance he's toast now. someone must be sacrificed and theresa may is already dead.

plus everybody obv hates him and he's not a key figure in negotiations.

If Davis had just said there are no impact assessments, it's the will of the people and we are here to carry it out so what's the point of doing one it would have saved him the time and the technocrats wouldn't be boring on my twitter rn.

Yeah, they've got a pile of embarrassing reports somewhere - the FOI requests make it clear that something exists. I'm just not sure whether they're embarrassing because they say Brexit will be a disaster, or because they're terrible, just the shoddiest desperately rushed guesswork padded with c&p filler with no co-ordination or consistency across departments. Probably both tbh.

that's p much what he did say.

xpost

It's actually impressive what a massive fuck-up this week has been, considering it's only Wednesday.

Corbyn says in July Liam Fox said the Brexit talks would be “the easiest in human history”. Does she still agree?

the lady is for turning?

They won't sack anyone, that's just implying that they agree there's something wrong.

May says nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. The only hard border is down the middle of the Labour party.

the fucking nerve of these people

the way he's so insouciant at the committee - hand waving and eating sweets (!) during it - well, it's almost as if he doesn't care about the UK leaving the EU and never has....

I mean he should've said it at the start, not pretended that impact assessments existed xps

full asymptotic allegory convergence: SINKHOLE BRITAIN vs the MIDSOMER MURDERS METAPHORBOT

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvUkDFtKsrM

An embattled councillor is found crushed under a fallen piece of stage equipment on the opening night of Macbeth. Suspicion falls on the village madrigal enthusiasts, angry that redevelopment on the land of a down-on-his-luck aristocrat might threaten to make the village do... pic.twitter.com/6x00hxbTOm

— Midsomer Murders Bot (@midsomerplots) December 5, 2017

I'm not sure if I'm stepping on your joke mark, but that conspiracy theory seems at least quite plausibly what's happened? Possibly the "Impact: dinosaur meteor level" has been filed off.

DD & Boris and Liam Fox are there effectively as part of a coalition government, there'd be trouble if they went and weren't replaced by others of the same stripe - unfortunately they may be the most competent of that lot.

it wasn't really a joke, more a caveat attached to the cited source for the reading (lobster is a good magazine! but it does reach for conspiracy by natural inclination)

if that is what happened surely the implications are pretty huge. like he is misleading parliament.

Anne-Marie Trevelyan, a Conservative, asks about new figures showing literacy improving.

May pays particular tribute to Nick Gibb, the minister for school standards, and to teachers around the country.

improving in some sectors

as with any conspiracy it would require an awful lot of people to keep shtum. if it were the case, i'd imagine that there would be a few pissed off civil servants willing to expose davis?

civil service bandwidth presumably too constrained by maintaining the lie that the earth is spherical

Why are we bothering w/ improving literacy when there are no impact assessments to read?

The plans to supply all children with the special glasses are well underway.

DD's options are that he was/is misleading parliament anyway - his best defence seems to be that when Seema Malhotra was asking for these reports, he felt it would be a waste of the committee's time to make sure the clear and obvious distinction was impressed on her in some way unwelcoming ears.

[At a poker game]

Dick Goodwin: I know you're lying.
Charles Van Doren: Bluffing. The word is bluffing.

Why are we bothering w/ improving literacy when there are no impact assessments to read?

― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, 6 December 2017 13:22 (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tick.jpg

I don't think this has to be a big conspiracy - the FOIs imply imply that the departments were basically feeding in information, led by DexEU, in order to produce reports - the standard response is 'we helped, but don't have reports - ask DeXEU' (and ime the civil service's instinct is buck-passing rather than whistle-blowing). So, if DexEU took final responsibility for producing the reports, they could keep a small circle of die-hards who collated the stuff and sat on the existent/non-existent reports.

so Davis can try to get away with fudging the language, but it does look contempt-of-parliament bad for him

One feature of all this is dexeu as an entity whose function is partly to cut-off other parts of the civil service. I don't think you could get to what extent they were sitting on reports or not, maybe we could've had a partial leak of one, if it existed at all.

Their level of staff turnover is reportedly four times as much as other civil service departments so the chances of a disgruntled employee leaking something must be pretty high.

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/12/05/theresa-mays-blue-monday/

lol fintansplaining: "Yet Tusk’s tweet was inadvertently ominous. It was a play on 'I Don’t Like Mondays,' a hit song in 1979 by the Irish rock band the Boomtown Rats. The song in turn was inspired by a mass shooting in a US school playground. Asked why she did it, the shooter, a sixteen-year-old girl, replied, 'I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day.' The lyrics, written and sung by Bob Geldof, now a prominent campaigner against Brexit, had her adding that 'I wanna shoot that whole day down.' Within hours of Tusk’s playfully optimistic tweet, Monday’s hopes would indeed be shot down do you see"

omfg

The other departments have Brexit teams as well, my partner interviewed for working on the one in DEFRA (which would be amazing and depressing).

Xp He is awful awful awful if he were only on ilx I would clown him all day

lol! Good job he didn't try shoehorning a clunky Fleetwood Mac ref in there as well.

... something about rumours, that's exactly what I thought too!

Enjoyed Hammond's admission that the Cabinet haven't even discussed what their preferred outcome is. It's like he deliberately picked his moment to drop that one.

Today Hammond says Britain will meet the divorce bill even in the case of no deal. No 10 deny this just hours later. What a mess this rabble are.

neat little highlights reel:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/patricksmith/nobody-said-it-was-easy?utm_term=.eswvLyy1a#.fq5dOQQYL

hammond seems good at this*
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/philip-hammond-uk-productivity-rates-low-because-more-disabled-people-are-in-work_uk_5a281714e4b044d16726b7bd

*gaffeing

Also the story of hammond being banned from flying in any MoD aircraft because of a funding row. What the fuck is going on?

the grown-ups are in charge iirc

https://i.imgur.com/sNrTf8N.gif

not only not in charge but gone on holiday and left us in the house on our own and we need to hope a neighbour calls social services

Moderation in all things including MoDaeration

poor

I didn't have any reports into a better pun

would have bet money on this tbh

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DQYtt1-WkAAkoX7.jpg

(ok maybe not the gift of home-made jam but the fact that they got on well) (it's from tim shipman's breezeblock of a book)

I can believe it too. My impression is that McDonnell is the one who truly detests, wouldn't get on at all.