I liked this from Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian this morning:
So nothing is agreed until everyone finds out exactly what it is that they're supposed to be agreeing, at which point it is still perfectly possible that nobody will agree to any of it. But the aim is to push the inevitable moment of truth — the point where both leavers and remainers realise exactly what's going to happen, and someone goes ballistic — as far down the road as possible.
She is, of course, right: this is the aim. The hope of the Remainers is that the Brexiteers will find out too late that it's soft after all.
And the Brexiteers hope that nothing is agreed, too late to do anything about it.
As the saying goes 'We ain't seen nothing yet'. And that's because the fall out from all this will be horrible, at best, and will divide this country for generations to come. Just look at Ireland post 1922 if you want to understand that. It's politics has still not recovered.
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We ain’t seen nothing yet?
Well…..smoke and mirrors 🙂
Which probably suits the Establishment as a nation fighting with itself won’t be uniting against them. It’s a very good outcome for the monkey we have on our backs.
The political implications of uncertainty almost always favour right-wing parties. Not surprised that the Tories have pulled ahead in the latest YouGov poll (not the most reliable, admittedly). May is a tough, canny politician. If she can hold the party together long enough and deliver any kind of ‘Brexit’, she will be anointed by the MSM spin doctors as St. Theresa. “Problem – reaction – solution.”
Simulatneously, progressive voices are being muted by the accumulating negative MSM PR for Corbyn. George Osborne was on the right track saying the LP could / should be streets ahead in the polls were it not for the paucity of the LP ‘leadership’, which is over-shadowing its own manifesto. Unfortunately, in today’s politics, the messenger is often more important than the message. While ‘Squawkbox’ sqwarks and ‘The Canary’ tweets – the right wing are getting the hang of social media manipulation.
I fear neither Corbyn nor May are going any time soon. The end result will be a victory for May – and I’m not a betting person.
I fear you are right
And I wish you were not
Heard that one before.
Sorry John D, but “May is a tough, canny politician…”?(? where have you been for the last six months?
Yes the media have reverted to type after the election – desperate to surgically graft her back her ‘safe pair of hands’, but she’s an absolutely pitiful performer (pitiable for some after her conference debacle).
George Osbourne’s observations are typically myopic and self-serving – he ignores the direction of movement in the polls – movement that will only go one way in the more balanced coverage we’ll get in the run-up to the next election. Contrary to your assertion, there;s very little evidence that the right are getting anything right as far as social media is concerned – sqwawking that it’s all fake, abusive or sexist just doesn’t wash. The MSM will be as impotent to stop the surge then as they were in June.
Is no one around here optimistic at all?
Not very, no
But that’s because I have no clue what labour would actually do
@AdrianD – I didn’t say she was a good PM. But to have climbed the greasy pole as successfully as she has, and to have survived as she has against the odds (both as Home Secretary and now as PM), she is surely both tough and canny.
Never a smart thing to understimate one’s opponent (same goes for Corbyn). The difference in this particular scenario is that she’s currently managing to keep the Tory Party together (just) and while doing that has the support of the MSM. The chaos surrounding ‘Brexit’ plays quite well into her hand as she will be seen as the person who, under duress from all sides, negotiated the ‘best available deal for the UK’. Corbyn is saying as little as possible, hoping the Tories will self-destruct’. But, IMHO, I believe his strategy is not one that resonates with the ‘silent majority’. As Richard says – the country simply has no idea what the LP would do better if they were in charge of the negotiations. It’s as divided as the Tories. Maybe even more so.
Usually “it’s the economy, stupid”. But at the next election it will be “it’s Brexit, stupid”. The full pragmatic impact of our leaving the EU cannot be known for at least 5 years, and that’s an eternity in politics. And it would be foolish to predict the eventual outcome; but reports that neoliberalism is dead are vastly exaggerated. Cynically one could presume that whatever are the final terms of ‘Brexit’, they will have been rubber-stamped by Goldman Sachs.
‘Nuff said. Be ‘irie’!
I hope this comment is not too long?
In the Brexit negotiations statement by Theresa May to the House of Commons, 11th December, 2017 the Prime Minister said this:
“When we leave the European Union, our laws will be made and enforced here in Britain, not in Luxembourg. So the EU has accepted that we will incorporate the withdrawal agreement into UK law, and citizens’ rights will then be enforced by our courts–where appropriate, paying due regard to relevant ECJ case law, just as they–[Interruption.] Wait for it: where appropriate, paying due regard to relevant ECJ case law, just as they already decide other matters with reference to international law when it is relevant.”
The purpose of Brexit, we are told (at least by those whose lives are suffused by constitutional metaphysics), is principally to bring back control from the EU to Britain; to return sovereignty to Westminster, where sovereignty should reside for, and in the interests of, the British people.
Under these older, pre-EU constitutional arrangements Parliamentary sovereignty is absolute. It knows no bounds. We must go back over a century for a clear statement of the constitutional world in which Brexiteers dream (Brexiteers rarely understand the past, but they do try to live in it, however remote from the modern world). Here is perhaps the most authoritative constitutional statement of Parliamentary authority of the kind pursued by Brexiteers: Dicey wrote this, in ‘England’s case against home rule’ (ironically his constitutional argument against Home Rule in Ireland):
“Under all the formality, the antiquarianism, the shams of the British constitution, there lies latent an element of power which has been the true source of its life and growth. This secret source of strength is the absolute omnipotence, the sovereignty, of Parliament.”
Dicey goes on to explain precisely what that entails, and sovereignty is absolute:
“Hence, it has been well said by the acutest of foreign critics that the merit of the English constitution is that it is no constitution at all…. …. Thus freedom has in England been found compatible at crises of danger with an energy of action generally supposed to be peculiar to despotism. The source of strength is, in fact, in each case the same. The sovereignty of Parliament is like the sovereignty of the Czar. It is like all sovereignty at bottom, nothing else but unlimited power;” (Quotations from ‘England’s case against home rule’, Ch.VII, p.168-9).
This means that when the PM claims that “we will incorporate the withdrawal agreement into UK law”, it is certainly true, and she may give that undertaking. What she cannot do is commit Parliament not to amend, radically change or strike down that law at any point after it has been passed.
A little history may not go amiss here. In 1706 the Scottish Parliament freely voted to create the modern ‘incorporated’ British state (‘freely’ here means the few hundred aristocrats and landowners who had a vote in the Scottish Parliament, and representing little more than themselves, their families and their own interests). Even then, ‘Union’ with England was only passed by the Scottish Parliament because it was supported by a strong balance of opinion within the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, which had profound influence and authority over Scottish opinion and culture in a period of deep political divisions. The Church of Scotland’s rights were protected in the 1707 Treaty of Union that created the single Westminster Parliament.
Following Union, in 1712 Westminster passed the Patronage Act, which quite calculatedly intended to undermine the independence and governance of Presbytery in the Church of Scotland, which had, since the Glorious Revolution, allowed the election of ministers by the heritors and elders of individual congregations, in association with each congregation’s Presbytery (we may describe this as a form of ‘subsidiarity’ to which many in the Church were deeply committed), in the service and interests of the same aristocrats and landowners who had voted for Union; who wished to exercise control over appointments as a matter of civil right, and in the service of the new British state. A state now dominated by Anglicans with a different tradition, perspective and political purpose, but holding similar secular values to the Scottish ‘Patrons’. It is not clear that Patrons even required to be members of the Church of Scotland. The 1712 Act created a crisis in the Church of Scotland, and in part led to the deeply divisive pattern of schism in the Church throughout the long eighteenth century; and which did not reach an apogee until the 1843 Disruption. Westminster exercised its principle of sovereignty, the effects were felt for generations thereafter; and a British Westminster principle of sovereignty was established that would be repeated, not only in Britain, but in British rule throughout the world.
Within the British constitutional tradition to which Brexiteers wish to return, no Government has the power to tie the hands of a future Parliament; if we are indeed taking back control, and returning to the UK constitutional position ex-ante the British EU Accession legislation, which works only because the UK surrendered ‘absolute’ sovereignty for a different model. There is no undertaking that can be offered that will permanently guarantee EU citizen’s rights that the PM can underwrite, unless “paying due regard to relevant ECJ case law, just as they already decide other matters with reference to international law when it is relevant”, means precisely what it says, and the ECJ has jurisdiction over British law, or in effect, we are not fully “taking back control”, long into the future.
What I have offered here with regard specifically to the PM’s statement is not a statement of fact, but a hypothesis; and I would be interested to see how and whether it can in fact be struck down. If the hypothesis stands, then I am not sure what the PM’s undertaking can be worth to the EU, whatever the intention; and I am not sure w
I agree with your hypothesis
Which is why the EU are right to want this enshrined in a Treaty now – parliament’s will is not enough
…. …. “and I am not sure what credence the EU should place in the offer.”
Richard, I know, I know. Typos. Must try harder.
[…] there is the Irish situation to resolve. Many Brexiteers are now saying 'nothing is agreed until everything is agreed' but this is simply not true. The agreement with the […]