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

actually i've changed my mind, brexit is good not bad now

Theresa May's warning to the EU: "We. Stand. Ready."

Me: "YAAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS." 🙌 pic.twitter.com/SFwLtbFXPr

— Darren Grimes (@darrengrimes_) September 21, 2018

(yes that is that darren grimes)

Between this and Elon Musk it's been tough times for the whole Grimes family.

https://i.postimg.cc/G3qbQWSz/asjd.png

Twenty-five years of plotting this exact moment and this is the best analogy he can come up with.

"Let them eat shit"

luv2 c england pay for my cake

wtf is Darren grimes ?

also, what is the other Darren Grimes?

Grimes is the 23-y-o fashion student mysteriously gifted £625k in dark money to buy adverts for Brexit illegally.

No deal is a lock. I'd like to renounce my citizenship. When is Soros going to sort me a seastead.

I feel like the problem with the EU's 'May will blink first' tactic is that it massively underestimates the stubborness and obsessiveness of her own backbenchers.

yes, may has been designed for disposability

I can't help but sympathise on some level. Brings to mind that Onion headline after Obama's election, 'Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job'.

Strong, tough, reckless: Verdict on Theresa May's blistering Brexit speech

So says the.. um... Bristol Post.

re grimes : ta SV for the reminder … I should have remembered that.

think that Redwood analogy used "milkshake" instead of "cake" originally

never heard of cake duck tbh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR61hCKAEqE

ill allow it

What's that German chess term for "a situation where one player has been absolutely banjaxed for the last half hour by a stupid error from about 20 moves ago but only just realised something is wrong"?

— Dan Davies (@dsquareddigest) September 21, 2018

lol

fraudandshowed

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/windrush-citizens-latest-citizenship-refused-home-office-sajid-javid-a8549101.html

the tory party reeks of death

“necessary good character requirement” if there was such a requirement to be an MP, 95% of these cunts would be gone.

'Brutal' headlines for May yesterday. Eulogised today.

Heaven needed a loathsome and vindictive micromanager.... Etc

Corbyn says he will accept any decision made by conference over a second Brexit referendum. Given there's no way that they'll vote against it I guess that's more or less settled but everything will depend on the wording of the motion.

no doubt Chuka and the melts gang will be saying Corbyn had to be dragged to this point, and then desperately struggling to find another line of attack .. because .. um .. what do we actually represent again .. erm..

I don't know what the latest polling is on brexit, but I presume people are turning against in significant numbers, otherwise this could be a bad move by Labour.

it will be extremely good when 'remain' wins referendum 2 and the team leave throw a shit fit

on the other hand, it's highly likely voters are less than sympathetic to the side they blame for re-opening a question they had thought settled and so leave would probably win referendum 2 by a margin

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DniNT9qWwAIurNN.jpg

I'm not surprised our lame brexit neggers are coming up short against this bad mofo.

I don't think Labour leave voters are that much of a problem really, certainly not as the picture gets bleaker as it almost certainly will.

They are certainly not that much of a problem compared to what we have at the moment, which is a choice between whatever May can cobble together or a plunge into the abyss. There needs to be some serious pressure from another direction and I can't see where else it would come from.

It's not even about overturning the result or even stopping Brexit, but anything that can be done to force a soft Brexit is a good thing right now.

"Best out of 7?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7N9J7PLps_8

a 2nd referendum with an equally narrow margin in either direction can only be great for the future of the UK

fuck the UK, fortunately

The current direction is not exactly going to be wonderful either. In fact it's pretty much impossible to see a scenario in which it ends well.

Ultimately you're serious about democratising the Labour Party then this is an important test case, the leadership seems ambivalent at best but the party is overwhelmingly in favour.

no, absolutely right, glad Corbyn is playing it sensibly. the still highly unlikely event of Ref 2 is not one to be excited about tho imo

There's no chance the government will agree to it but it has symbolic importance and puts clear blue water between the parties on Brexit issue (as opposed the slightly woolly/completely nonsensical Starmer tests). Labour need to be on the right side of the argument for when it all goes tits up.

It also significantly increases the Parliamentary pressure on May to get a deal that actually benefits the country, as opposed to one that satisfies her own backbenchers. Although I have zero faith in Grieve, Soubry etc not falling into line when shit gets real.

What does everyone reckon to chance of November election? Ordinarily I’d dismiss it, but May is stupid/bloody minded enough to see it as an opportunity to carry on with her Chequers plan, especially if Labour decides to support ref2.

(xp) OTM, the 'reasonable' wing of the Conservative Party generally crumble under the slightest pressure.

the so-called Tory rebels don't even smoke Gitanes and chew gum, and they always go to bed at 8pm.

Dominic Grieve is not a guy who inspires much of anything tbh.

if the outcome is remain next time, the EU should totally go "oops, we've changed our locks now, too bad"

http://www4.pictures.zimbio.com/pc/Dominic+Grieve+XGqduwr9cd6m.jpg

Grieve is so amorphous, characterless and bland that ppl literally look right through him.

i think you’ve posted the wrong pic there calz, that’s just a photo of a copper

I actually don’t entirely agree with Matt abt the six tests: yes they’re woolly and yes they are likely entirely useless on the campaigning doorstep to the average would-be voter — and yes, it turns out that play almost no part in the MSM discussion of labour’s position.

But if the last were ever part of the Corbs machine’s plan — given its almost total lack of interest in Campbellian spin and policy-of-the-dasy newsgrabbing, at a practical moral AND political level — it isn’t any more (as a consequence, they do need clear-red-water big-meme stuff at this point).

Here’s why I think it’s not total nonsense. Since the election, they’ve stuck — without breakthrough success but also without slippage (in the face of the most hostile media coverage an opposition’s ever faced) — to a strategy of “don’t interrupt when yr enemy is making a mistake”. Which is always good politics (even if its probably a slight duff idea to just tweet it out, as barry gardiner did a couple of days back).

Give that this entails being seen to do literally nothing almost all the time, and given that, as signalling, this hardly cultures anything to stop rising anxiety and irritation among those who (a) blame corbyn for brexit anyway and (b) are beginning to scream 👏 SOMEONE 👏 DO 👏 SOMETHING 👏 , it’s not a bad idea to be sending out — much quieter — signals to specific constituencies, if not about what the plan, then about what the plan very much won’t flirt with. It shares form and function with GBrown’s five tests — for not entering the euro — and it operates in a similar way: Brown couldn’t say out loud “we will never enter the euro”, bcz of the internal NuLab ructions this wd cause, and the hostage to fortune it wd give to the hostile forces arrayed before them. So he drew up a — usefully foggy (iirc even foggier than Starmer’s) — list of principles, malleable enough that he could always tap the sign when anyone got arsey about it.

These are the main constituencies I think might sometimes have got arsey at GB:
1: the city and big business
2: the other countries in the EU (many of of them busily and at the time happily plunging into the eurozone, a future pitfall we ended up dodging)
3: and the shadow cabinet itself, bcz it’s useful have a set of state principles (however vague) that shape the limits of agitated discussion. You can just rule a bunch of stuff out.
4: wonks in the media (at the FT end of things, not columnists or telegraph editorial writers)

Same applies for Corbs, with some demurral re 4.

1: the corbs team will have been having continued behind-closed-doors discussions with worried corporate and money ppl, abt what they intend, despite their seeming inactivity — backed up possibly with firmer individal commitments not made public. The continued salience of the six tests is useful as a low-key nod and a wink in this direction, to say “nothing’s changed”.

2: Same as one, except also establish political relationships on the down-low, with at least some of the EU27, which offer about as much as it’s even sensible for a party in opposition to offer as their alternative approach to either continued brexit negotiations or kicking brexit to the kerb. At a minimum this signal says (to the EU27, whose diplomats are expert at decoding such things), Labour under Corbs has no interest in no deal.

3: Very important for a shadow cabinet that brings together ppl with quite different political outlooks and quite different loyalties EU-wise. It’s a steady-as-we-go index that ensures everyone on the team continues to pull with the team (and as such a striking contrast with how division in the May cabinet has been handled).

4: I’m not sure how important 4 actually is now… it was more pivotal I for GB, still in the Campbellian era; it is very evidently much diminished as a concern to the Corbs team. who on the whole seem to take the internet more seriously than they take the legacy media. So possibly it’s been supplanted by unaligned and/or party partisan wonkish types on social media (really just saying this bcz ppl like Dan Davies and Alex Harrowell — who aren’t fools and are hired out as analysts of best business decision re the immediate future in a variety of business areas — seem to take consider the 6 tests a useful talking point when arguing on-line, in FinTwit and elsewhere). I can’t yet bring myself to believe this is more than my best-choice forensic bubble though — it’s not a constituency with much of a long tail as yet.

So that’s why the six tests aren’t entirely nonsensical.

(lol i am cleaning my flat today, extremely meticulously, as you can all see)

adding, re diplomats decoding things: they enjoy doing this, it's their superpower, and (i imagine) they very much don't take seriously ppl who just send out chaotic or high-publicity bullshit signals: greece were somewhat doing this a year or three back (step forward mr yanis "game theory is garbage i have the cunningest plan" varoufakis, who while an entertaining fuck-the-bankster-squares performer on the world stage was p much completely useless at the actual negotiating table). insofar as its attempting anything, the may brexit team is replaying the varoufakist tragedy as, well, you know where this going

haha so to my actual point, the fact that labour has been sending out grown-up diplomatic signals over the last two years plays well for them and may even encourage some of the EU27 to manoeuvre the situation behind the scenes towards labour coming to power and changing the game (something they very very obviously could never say openly)

^^^this is entirely speculative and i doubt we'll find out either till after we're all dead (over to you bizarro)