There are mornings when, whilst walking the dog, a word pops into my head. Perfidious did this morning:
David Davis, in other words. And as a result the UK too as far as the rest of the world is concerned right now.
And that makes me very annoyed.
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I can’t disagree but the word I had in mind begins with ‘W’ and ends in ‘R’.
If I was going to be kind I’d call him capricious.
There is nothing states-man like about the man at all. At all. Ne Rien!
I am reluctant to lower the tone here (elsewhere is another matter) but, without giving too much away the righteous Mr Davis has been celebrated in poetry, using exactly that word.
Great minds think alike, and fools seldom differ.
Without repeating the entirety of the work, and avoiding repetition of our unfortunate choice of word, the secobd line of the Limerick about the righteous Mr Davis reads:
“Was blighted with chancres and scabies”
The inner rhyming couplet is libellous and in any casr too obscene to record; the work concludes with:
“Stop biting, we don’t fancy rabies”.
I would stress that Mr. Davis is an elected MP and is held in the highest regard by his peers.
Ah, but every cloud has a silver lining. Hopefully his performance will have decided yet another few souls that enough is enough and it’s time for Scotland to go its own way. Then, with a bit of luck, common sense and hard work, we can show there is a better, simpler and fairer way to run a country.
The word has a long history in English foreign affairs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfidious_Albion
I guess deep down I must have known that
But I had forgotten it
Thanks
Ah! Perfidious Albion. A good word to remember.
The Irish have an old saying that the reason the sun never sets on the British Empire is that God doesn’t trust the Brits in the dark. History tells them they have good cause to be suspicious.
I do begin to think that they are just pushing to see how much they can get away with. Until there are riots in the streets (and even then I somehow doubt any effect) supported by the usual suspects in the media, things will simply get worse. On a personal level, the government have no empathy with the populace and have nothing to lose whatever happens.
As for Scotland, I wish it were further south then I would move there.
I suspect the purpose of the Davis ‘clarification’ is to present the British response to EU insistence that there were Phase One and Phase Two negotiations; an EU requirement to which the British, reluctantly, acceded. Only they didn’t. The British wanted everything dependent on the trade talks (effectively a single ‘Phase’), and had to accept the EU two stage requirement. This is the way the British government intends to negotiate. The British, it seems, were not sincere in Phase One.
Davis is demonstrating that the EU can do what it likes, but for the British there is only a single phase, with everything depenedent on trade. The British will then roll all the Phase One concessions, profusely made, and attempt to renegotiate them in Phase Two, if they can see an advantage in using them as bargaining counters. The British are not negotiating in good faith.
Perfidious Albion, anyone?
It is the English and the DUP that are negotiating, no-one else. Don’t include Wales or Scotland as we have been deliberately excluded.
Good faith is not a Westminster thing.
Not to nit-pick but there’s a danger of sliding into the kind of nationalistic stereotypes that are just what the Brexiters and right specialise in. English vs Scots vs Irish vs Welsh. Speaking as a Scottish – English mongrel with a touch of Irish, brought up in Cumberland. Similarly blaming it all on London. Which is not the same as either Westminster or the City
For the record, London voted strongly Remain, voted for Labour and has the most mixed community of just about any city in the world. It has also has the highest proportion of people living in poverty in the UK – see: https://data.london.gov.uk/apps_and_analysis/poverty-in-london-201516-2/
Thats about 2.3m people. About the same as the total population of the North East. In case people have forgotten, its where Grenfell Tower is. In the London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea which has a lot more people living in poverty than living in penthouses. But despite the poverty, people don’t’ blame their problems on Europe or on people from other countries living here. You could say similar things about Bristol and other cities, not just in the South. Ought to make us think …
This about specific areas of the country, mostly in England but lets not forget significant parts of Wales too. Areas that too often retain attitudes that are reminiscent of the 1950s and which have too often not moved on. Im reminded of it each time I go back to or talk to friends in Cumberland or Lincolnshire. As a result, they were susceptible to the messages of UKIP and the Brexit campaign. Thats not to deny the problems of those areas but they are no worse than say Tower Hamlets or St Pauls
We also know that most MPs, wherever they come, do not agree with what is happening but are being driven by their parties that have both drifted to the edges of politics and are happy, lazily, cynically to use Europe as a scapegoat for failed policies that are almost entirely of the UK’s own making. In the case of the Tories, its an small, aged and deeply conservative membership selecting and driving their MPs. In the case of Labour, a greatly increased and much younger membership (hooray for that) who are wondering who really is looking after their futures. If when we say the problem is ‘Westminster’ or London, we just mean the location, we are missing the point. This is about a dysfunctional political system which would be dysfunctional wherever it is located.
If we diagnose the problems incorrectly, we are guaranteed to get the wrong answers. Just after the referendum there were some excellent analyses that really looked at underlying attitudes and and what drove voting patterns. I don’t remember being Scottish, Irish, Welsh or English as being a dominant factor. So lets not play the Brexiter, alt-right, Nationalists game
Even if David and co do look like the worst kind of old, arrogant English imperialists, they don’t necessarily represent the country
Thanks Robin
Davis’s performance – and that of Gove – show, I’m afraid that your and John Warren’s worst assumptions are probably correct. It is hard to imagine any behaviour more certain to strengthen the EU’s resolve and more likely to increase the ‘penalty’ type clauses in any future ‘deal’. Why would anybody trust anything that these dreadful people now say – let alone promise for the future?
The Telegraph website has the text of a letter from Theresa May to conservative MPs:
“The Government has said that we are a country that honours its obligations, and that is what we will do. We have agreed a fair settlement of commitments we have made while a member of the EU, in the spirit of our future partnership. It depends upon a broader agreement being reached — as I have said, nothing is agreed until everything is agreed — so if there is no agreement then our offer also falls away.”
There you have the key to Britain’s negotiating position. Far from a ‘no deal’ Brexit being further from happening (in Davis’s spin), it is now much closer. The hardline Brexiteers can hardly believe their luck. I can see the spin from that ‘Leave now with nothing – and save £40Bn’. I think we may describe the Phas One negotiations, taken as a whole – as being …. …. Fake News.
I think you may be right
And Ireland really is stuffed
If I was them I would veto progress this week on the basis of ‘material developments’
I completely agree, Richard. They might not even be alone in so doing as the barefaced duplicity inherent in May’s letter should put the whole of the 27 on notice for their own joint and several well-being. How any PM can write both the first sentence, John quotes, and then follow it with the last is beyond me.
“And Ireland really is stuffed” I’m afraid you might be right but very strange things are happening in Northern Ireland. Brendan Heading (Belfast Alliance) has for example posted an article recently
“But the tenor of the present-day debate in general has led me, and I believe many people in the centre ground, to reach the point where we are struggling to find reasons to support maintaining the Union between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom. Anecdotally, I’ve found many of my friends feel the same way. I can’t say how many of us there are, and I can’t claim to be representative. What I do know is that in my wider social circle people who would never have even considered discussing reunification are now giving serious thought to how it could be satisfactorily accomplished.
I believe, without some sort of reversal, and without some sort of change in attitude within the ranks of the DUP, that this Brexit process is going to create a new legion of non-nationalist supporters of Irish reunification who, within our lifetimes, will vote Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom”.
In the event of a hard Brexit a recent opinion poll has a majority in favour of a United Ireland.
There is a blog on Progressive Pulse today http://www.progressivepulse.org/brexit/will-ni-see-its-100th-birthday-in-2022 please feel free to comment
Sean
Are you surprised? What would you do?
Is the religious divide quite as important now?
Is the Republic quite so unacceptable any more?
And doesn’t the UK feel like a place you’d not be sure you’d want to be a part of?
I can see just why that’s happening
I suspect Scotland will also have such inclinations
“If I was them (The Irish) I would veto progress this week on the basis of ‘material developments’…”
If I was them I’d be tempted to veto out of ‘badness’.
Given what has been said over the past few days the Irish may not even need to use a veto; there could be numerous candidates who decline to accept this travesty.
Do we actually have any ALLIES in the EU? If yes, I wonder whether they are in favour of Brexit soft or hard?
It is very difficult not to remain permanently, jaw-droppingly astonished at the incoherence and untrustworthiness of British Government statements about Brexit.
Here is the latest signal from the Telegraph, via LBC: today Davis has told LBC in an interview that: “What I actually said yesterday in terms was we want to protect the peace process, want to protect Ireland from the impact of Brexit for them, and I said this was a statement of intent which was much more than just legally enforceable.
Of course it’s legally enforceable under the withdrawal agreement but even if that didn’t happen for some reason, if something went wrong, we would still be seeking to provide a frictionless invisible border with Ireland.”
It has taken 24 hours to shift the ground again. The problem that Davis does not even appear capable of understanding is that nobody (anywhere) knows for two consecutive days, or actually two consecutive minutes; or two consecutive sentences, what the British Government means, intends or is trying to do. There is a consequence that flows from that; when everyone, everywhere begins to realise that this unclarity, ambiguity, uncertainty is not a rare occurrence, a once only slip; but the regular outocme of every pronouncement that the Government ever makes on Brexit. It follows that if we cannot understand the Government, it becomes inevitable that nobody can quite, or fully, trust its word. Nothing ever means anything at all; it is all sand through our fingers.
Mr Davis says that you do not have to be clever to do his job. He certainly ticks that box; but we do need to be able to understand what the Government is saying, and what it is committed to; and committing all of is to, and a policy statement has to last beyond the next news bulletin. The public do not all suffer from short-term memory problems. We can work out what is happening, or may not be happening when a Government spokesman speaks, or mis-speaks (another favourite word for the airy dismissal of Government incoherence), and we can – and indeed must – draw serious conclusions from what is being said, or done; for in the end, it is all our names.
Apologies – “it is in all our names”.
John
Uor’e (sic) going to have to deal with this 🙂
Richard
Ouch!
I think you’re close to the mark, John.
The EU team will be reading this closely and quite rightly, smelling a large and malodorous rat. Whether it’s their incompetence or disingenuity, they have learnt not to trust the British team.
I share the suspicion that the people leading this want the hardest of Brexits to suit their extreme neoliberal agendas. They will then play the nationalist card for all its worth, blaming it all on the Europeans, backed up by their media allies. That will stoke further divisions both within the UK, and between the UK and Europe.
Putin will be absolutely delighted and Trump will be pretty happy too. Legatum and their friends will be rubbing their hands with glee
From his inaction one can only think that Corbyn is happy for this to happen too
As ever it is hard to tell with Davis, and he’s a fair representative for the rest of the Brexit gang. Is it gross incompetence and a complete inability to comprehend the complexity, or wilful dishonesty and an inability to keep to his word on anything? Either way, seen from an EU perspective it makes he and the British government a wholly unreliable party to be negotiating with. Perfidious about sums it up
Clinging as I do to a small lifebelt of hope, I continue to believe that the EU team backed by the serious European countries (Merkel, Macron, Rutte et al) would far rather keep the UK close. Whereas the Brexiters are in capable of seeing beyond the financial dimensions (settlement, trade), the EU of course see this in much wider political, social and economic terms. The economic hit to Europe will be hard but a fraction of the hit to the UK – one of the many deceits that the Brexiters are still repeating. It is the wider impact that the EU are concerned about, especially in an world where Putin and Trump are rattling their sabres.
As a result, they have tolerated the UK’s incompetence and perfidy, but it does not mean that they are going to give way, as the track record shows. It is telling that they have shown far more concern for for citizens living in different countries and the Irish situation that the British have. Shameful. I feel more confident of them looking after my interests than I do of this government
High time the British people learnt that Nature (of which they’re part) operates on a preferred basis of “Discriminative Mutualism” not “Go-It-Alone Individualism”:-
http://mbio.asm.org/content/7/2/e01395-15.full.pdf+html
Schofield says:
December 11 2017 at 1:23 pm
“High time the British people learnt that Nature (of which they’re part) operates on a preferred basis of “Discriminative Mutualism” not “Go-It-Alone Individualism”:-”
http://mbio.asm.org/content/7/2/e01395-15.full.pdf+html
Interesting link, Schofield, Thanks.
Quite consistent really with what Dawkins was saying in ‘The Selfish Gene’. (Though it goes further in the detail) A theory which has been widely misunderstood and, I feel, deliberately miss-stated; much as Darwin’s original thinking was distorted to further the idea of eugenics.
In both cases it was the focus on and willful mis-interpretation of one word to the exclusion of the sense of the whole: ‘fittest’ and ‘selfish’.
As ever the wicked bamboozle the stupid with words, to justify their own aims and purposes. Or maybe the ‘wicked’ are just stupid too.
This is off-topic, but I feel the need to respond to this comment: “Darwin’s original thinking was distorted to further the idea of eugenics”. With all due respect, I do not believe it stands up.
Justice cannot be done to a critical analysis here, but suffice to say that eugenics grew directly out of Darwin’s efforts; through his relative Galton, with whom he worked closely, and his posthumous disciple Fisher; a brilliant Cambridge mathematician who was a convinced Eugenicist and worked closely with Leonard Darwin, and with Darwin’s papers, to maintain Darwin’s status as the key breakthrough in evolution in spite of the fact that for Fisher, the thorough mathematician and statistician, realised that the key breakthrough was based on Mendelism, while Darwin’s theory was a non-particulate theory (which it need not have been); a problem created only and solely by Darwin’s clear statement of his own theory.
The usual suspects on a web forum I frequent have been decrying May for her ‘betrayal’. Despite all evidence to the contrary, it seems that these people simply won’t believe that anything but a hard brexit will do. They can’t wrap their heads around the idea that leaving the EU will be anything but a positive so dismiss out of hand any evidence of problems and it seems all but certain that we’ll end up with these Brexiteers blaming those running (the admittedly incompetent) negotiations rather than the issue of Brexit itself.
When I’ve questioned these folks about the Irish border problem, the difficulties in leaving the Customs Union and the like, you’ll not be surprised that no considered answer is received. Usually, it’s a load of waffle about how the EU bigwigs want closer unification (something which we could resist as a member state), claptrap about being ‘free’ of the ECJ and so forth. It’s an act of faith for these people.
A view from the Shining City on a Hill
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/12/theresa-may-brexit-britain-european-union?mbid=nl_th_5a2da5aecbb3bf329792340e&CNDID=50198349&spMailingID=12538112&spUserID=MjAzMDkwNzYwOTk5S0&spJobID=1301003610&spReportId=MTMwMTAwMzYxMAS2
Interesting….
And worth reading
Theresa May is certainly walking a very peculiar tightrope.
Cheers from both sides of the Leave/Remain divide in her own party in the House yesterday, in response to Friday’s announcement, would seem to indicate an unexpected sure-footedness.
Or at the very least well-rosined plimsolls.
Its telling that if you read virtually any international media, they tend to think that the UK has taken leave of its senses.
Unless its Russia Today or Breitbart – funny that…
It’s not just the media
I have travelled extensively this autumn and am at Gatwick now
Everywhere I go, from the States to every country across Europe I have been to people I speak to – and not just those I meet but others I fall into conversation with (and I make a habit of doing so because I want to know what people think) believe we have taken leave of our sense.
Davis should be fired for this: and it is now the expedient thing to do, even for the most timid of leaders.
But the day is passing and Davis has not been fired.
Fabulist
Strange to think of an 18th century French expression to describe this not so “honnête homme”, but I suppose he has done more than most to reinforce the clichés about the English upper class and their difficulties in accepting that they no longer own the world, and the world owes nothing to them.
Looks like the EU team have taken a view on Davis and May’s potential perfidiousness…
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/a4ca5698-debb-11e7-872d-4b5e82b139be
You inspired a blog post Robin
[…] there is the perfidious Mr Davis to […]