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

can't trust intelligence services = yeah sure
something something Establishment trying to get Donald Trump = oh god i just don't care any more

I think Rod Hull was done in by the MFI!

I was having a conversation with a highfalutin general practitioner type about this last week and she started going on about the British secret services assassinating princess Di.

and yet fergie still lives, wtf

you can't fuck with members of The Black Hand Eyed Peas!

Up Against the Wall Toesucker

lobby journos shitting the bed again is it

state of this

Motion being scrambled by Labour MPs to back PMs view that Russia definitely culpable - taking v different line to Corbyn pic.twitter.com/XdfmkiGtCK

— Laura Kuenssberg (@bbclaurak) March 14, 2018

Has May said, unequivocally, that Russia is responsible - or just that it's "highly likely" and they have failed to respond to queries on it?

I don't think she has, Wes Streeting has though, one in the eye for Mr. Putin.

He's not to be messed with. He can pull a few strings and the McDonald's in Red Square will be history.

love too not learn the lesson from prosecuting punchy foreign policy on a dodgy prospectus

seumas milne expertly boiling some piss this afternoon

Just reminded of this classic:

https://t.co/ye0TUqrHq8 pic.twitter.com/kfnelAvh3F

— Dan Howdon (@danielhowdon) March 14, 2018

piss boiling watch: macron has escalated the situation by agreeing with JC

did we ever get piss sautéed

How could Macron let Fred down so cruelly?

Yeah, such a disappointment from that stalwart of the left, lol.

Any remote chance of Lossl or Zanka starting any games in the World Cup, Fred? I might have to adopt Denmark this year.

I have no idea. At some point I should figure out who the other players are who aren't Christian Eriksen...

What do people think - has Corbyn fucked it? Lots of shouting about his statement today, but then the Tories love a chance to talk tough on national security.

medium term i doubt it: mainly bcz -- as usual -- i think the govt's paths forward are much muddier than the shouty ppl seem to have recognised

as sure as eggs is eggs Chuka, Wes and Stella and chums would consider voting down a Corbyn "Free Oxygen Act" and they are so often on the wrong side of the argument. I can't see any good coming from the escalating tough talk and tit for tat sanctions. I think it will end up damaging May in the long run. But I bet The S*n is loving it right now though.

Well I personally am convinced the Government has a foolproof strategy to deal with Russia pic.twitter.com/CfMh4dpUgF

— Alistair (@acrgx_) March 15, 2018

extremely good country

on friday march 29 next year we're gonna get annexed by russia while the remainder of the eu points at us and does the nelson laugh

god, the nation run by corrupt plutocrats with no regard for human rights, what a chilling vision of the future

What do people think - has Corbyn fucked it? Lots of shouting about his statement today, but then the Tories love a chance to talk tough on national security.

Stephen Bush was good on this today.

It's easy to see how voters will look at a big, scary nation in Russia, at an uncertain ally in the White House and a divided ally in the European Union, and decide that actually, it's all too worrying and the prudent thing is simply to step away from it all. Most of us aren't former double agents, after all. While Jeremy Corbyn is not quite a founding shareholder as far as scepticism of foreign policy adventures go he certainly got in early as far as buying stock went, and its electoral value may be some way short of its peak. And as far as Theresa May goes, the expectation that she will "look strong" as a result does hinge rather on some kind of victory emerging from the stand-off with Vladimir Putin, which seems fairly unlikely, to put it mildly. If the United Kingdom's austerity-stretched defences and threadbare alliances are left exposed - and don't rule out the possibility that the unity among Nato and the EU will not last very long - then again, there is a political benefit to Corbyn, too.

But equally, that the attack happened here in the United Kingdom may change things as far as public opinion goes. We don't know, absent a sustained set of polling, and thus far we don't have anything other than hunch.

Another potential complication comes via EuroIntelligence, which highlighted a Die Welt interview that has had little pick-up in the British press: according to former German defence official Hans Rühle, anyone who comes into direct contact with Novichok will die. If that turns out to be the case not only for the Skripals but for others caught in the attack, the public may decide that merely expelling 23 diplomats and a Royal boycott of the World Cup is rather thin gruel. Corbyn's portfolio could yet turn out to be insufficiently well-hedged if the public mood recovers some of its pre-Iraq appetite for intervention abroad.

That last paragraph seems particularly pertinent.

One of their major problems is that as far as the party grassroots go it feels as if the only dividing lines the sceptics have with the party leadership is that they like bombs, the single market and McDonalds restaurants, only one of which is particularly popular among Labour party activists. Their crisis looks set to continue no matter what.

Good zing here though.

lol wtf are we gonna do if the public decide the government's actions to date are 'thin gruel', declare war on russia?

a lot of people like McDonalds it's true

i don't remember that much appetite for intervention abroad pre-Iraq

pre-WWI maybe

not sure jingoists have ever been a majority, they're just loud. loud and purple in the face.

The government isn't going to do anything beyond expelling a few diplomats, this is entirely a gamble over whether bellicose sabre-rattling is going to be a vote-winner or, at the very least, whether it's going to lose Labour enough votes next time around.

They might decide to get tough on a few money laundering rings and maybe freeze a few assets but I'm really not sure that's a Pandora's box the government want to open.

i guess it's all useful cover for a government that has actually achieved the sum total of fuck-all since they were (kinda, sorta) re-elected

i don't think it'll make much difference since they already thru every bit of "Corbyn loves terrorism and hates us for our freedom" last time round, the kinda muttonheads that respond to that stuff have already decided against him

Plenty of PLP would get rid of Milne, given half a chance.

"Russia: go away, shut up, pay £30,000 for dinner with me" pic.twitter.com/Bl851QIhIN

— Leo Mikłasz (@leomiklasz) March 15, 2018

slamdunk.gif

maybe he's angling after 60K

I think Milne made a mistake in saying as much as he did, can't keep the old opinion writer down I suppose. The chances of the government actually being right (when it comes to who initiated the attack at least) are too high to say much beyond the bare minimum.

I bet risible Walter The Softy fool doing the tough guy act almost wees himself when he sees people walking down the street with umbrellas these days!

I thought the press didn’t usually name the spokesman who’d made a comment ?

Foreign policy is Corbyn's thing

this is news to me!

judging by the way sam coates summarised what milne said yesterday -- with quite a lot of strategic indirect speech to allow the words used the questioner to seem as if they were being said, or directly resisted, by the questionee -- i think this was a bit of a deliberate ambush… to actually force him to stumble into saying "it depends what you mean by responsible!" (which always looks shifty).

instead, milne leant very hard on the fact that may was at that time still distinguishing between "russians responsible = putin ordered it" and "russians responsible = stuff unfortunately stolen from their labs" -- and this i think is where the question of the reliability of the intelligence services arises (in terms of competence as much as malice), since what kind of long-term response the uk govt makes depends on which of these two meanings of responsibility they end up considering salient). for sure the uk security services can make this distinction, but (a) can we trust them to? and (b) more importantly, who in the rest of the world is going to trust them to? assuming we know what RT will say, what will the infowars line be and who will be being swayed by it?

the stupid thing is of course that this issue arises even more urgently for the govt, who badly need a fallback short of full-on casus belli -- but risk being bundled into more extreme confrontations than they actually want to set in train, just by the way the media is going after corbyn at the moment. better by far they have independent confirmation for what russia's role is (and indeed that the chemicals are what porton down say they are and come from where porton down say they do) -- it gives the govt time and space not to be backed into a corner i suspect they really don't want to be in

ambush = by newspaper reporters (possibly coates himself) on milne, if that's not clear

(and to be clear, the kind of ambush that's absolutely a political reporter's job, even if he's doing that job for murdoch) (and even on best interpretation, milne's highly lawyerly reply still of course looks shifty and is spinnable against him, though not as badly as other replies would have been)

No 10 releases joint statement from UK, US , Germany and France calling on Russia to explain itself and provide full details of Novichock programme to OPCW, chemical weapons watchdog

— Laura Kuenssberg (@bbclaurak) March 15, 2018

I have missed a lot of this political story. What has Milne said?

I do not understand how the UK can stand up to Russia in any military way. In that sense tough talk to Russia doesn't seem to mean much. It seems hollow and I suppose, as Mark S says, takes people to a place they don't really want to be.

I agree, though, with proposals to stop dirty Russian money, etc.