Verbal

Aside from your usual self-serving mythologising, how on earth did you miss the really big implication of that article - that if the big beasts (you have to include France as well who have elections) in the EU won't be ready to negotiate until the Autumn, then it makes no sense to trigger Article 50 until after those elections. After all, what politician in their right mind would trigger a two-year-deadline-driven legal clause and then twiddle their thumbs for up to nine months of those two year? But - this being Brexit and the age of post-factual, irrational politics - how are politicians going to withstand the rising hysteria from Brexiters if Article 50 is NOT triggered in Jan/Feb next year? It seems May and her three Brexiteers are bound to make a decision they know is wrong - and hugely damaging to British economic interests.

It's funny how you read that quote. I read it as the sort of thing an executioner says just before bringing down the guillotine. Verhofstadt is a federal fundamentalist. He's also the European Parliament's point man for Brexit negotiations. He's not going to go soft - on the contrary, he thinks Britain out of the EU is a good thing. That's the problem: each bit of the EU has lined up arch opponents of Britain to do the negotiating. Brexiters, who've been in the habit of talking as if the UK can simply announce its terms, turn up to meetings and leave stuffed with UK-friendly agreements, are in for an awful shock.

So while one Corbynist cultist equates ISIS with anti-fascists, another celebrates the life-threatening illness of a Jewish politician who happened to be one of the key architects of the Oslo Accords. If you read through the Twitter feed of this particular individual, 'Revolutionary Cat', you get a horrifying insight into the obsessional and paranoid Corbynist hive mind. https://twitter.com/IainDale/status/775814523781513216

This will make the Corbyn cultists truly electable. Tosh Macdonald, president of the train drivers' union ASLEF, told a TUC fringe meeting today that Hilary Benn is no different to Adolph Hitler, and that ISIS is comparable to the republicans fighting Francoist fascists in the Spanish civil war. “The only comparison I can draw is with Hitler and Mussolini, bombing the republican lines in Spain.” 'Benn bad/ISIS good' is a great slogan. I can see the votes rolling in come the election/revolution. Perhaps a peerage for Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is already in the offing? http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/hilary-benn-compared-to-hitler-by-pro-jeremy-corbyn-union-leader_uk_57d6fdf1e4b0ac5a02df2f17

Some questions intended for the three Brexiteers and May, struggling with the essentially anti-British consequences of Brexit. But perhaps our pet Brexiters here would like to have a stab at some answers? Or, more likely, wriggle out of the questions? (The questions are posed, by the way, by an experienced trade negotiator.) 1. Is it government policy that the UK will leave the EU Customs Union? 2. Is it the government’s intention to seek membership of the Single Market?  3. Will the government come clean about the increase in red tape which awaits exporters who want to continue selling their goods into the EU post-Brexit? 4. How will the UK negotiate new WTO schedules of commitments in areasonable timescale, given that this will require consensus of all WTO members, some of whom are likely to object? 5. How long does the government expect it will take to negotiate a Free Trade Agreement with the EU? Does it believe it can be achieved in the 2-year time frame of the article 50 negotiations? 6. What is the government’s plan to prevent a highly damaging hiatus between the end of the article 50 process and the commencement of an EU FTA? 7. What will the government do to protect UK interests against the risk that ratification of the EU FTA is blocked by EU Member States? 8. Will the government confirm its determination to avoid the so-called ‘WTO option’, given its unworkability and the Treasury’s estimate that it would reduce GDP by some 7.5%? 9. How will the government address the fact that third countries cannot enter into meaningful negotiations with the UK until the UK’s future relationship with the EU is clear and its WTO schedule of concessions agreed? What will happen to UK export markets during the hiatus in between? 10. What is the government’s estimate of the increase in food prices that would result from applying EU tariff levels to imports from the EU and losing access to preferential food imports under EU agreements with third countries? 11. Does the government intend to pursue an interim agreement which preserves the UK’s access to the Single Market while a comprehensive FTA is negotiated? 12. How many external trade negotiators and consultants does the government intend to recruit over the next two years, and at what projected cost?

Simple-minded brexiters are oblivious to the warning signs. All those slapping noises coming out of May's cabinet, for example. Davis claiming single market membership is 'improbable'. Slapped down. Fox claiming British businesses - the only roadmap out of this mess - is 'fat and lazy'. Slapped down. Johnson, bizarrely a senior cabinet minister resorting to social movementing a la Momentum. Slapped down. Oh, and all journalists wanting a definition of Brexit (other than the ludicrously vacuous 'it means Brexit'). Slapped down. It seems that whether you're the slapper or slapee there's an awful lot of panic, fear and confusion at the heart of government. What there isn't is a single coherent thought on how to put one foot on front of the other on this.

Quite. Not not the slightest clue. The utter brain-dribbling idiocy of 'hard' Brexiteers is astonishing. We should probably keep articles like this away from them. http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/this-is-what-would-actually-happen-if-we-implemented-the-brexit-economic-plans-suggested-by-a7236816.html

For anyone who's interested, here's a list of events taking place later today in NYC to commemorate the 15th anniversary of lives lost in 9/11. http://www.villagevoice.com/news/how-nyc-is-commemorating-the-15th-anniversary-of-9-11-this-weekend-9089951 Among the worst statistics is the 343 firefighters who died - people rushing towards the unfolding tragedy to save lives. https://twitter.com/HFXFirefighters/status/774796993038278656 https://twitter.com/ConorMcGinn/status/774878372291833856

On the wisdom of crowds... It's a favourite habit among more limited individuals in the Corbyn cult to post endless photos of the great adoring crowds following 'Jeremy' around. Here's one such picture, posted by Momentum Sheffield. It's a pinned tweet from 20 August - so it's something they're clearly proud of. https://twitter.com/MomentumSheff/status/766982247668862976 The effect of this mass love-in? A thumping victory in the most recent Sheffield council by-election for the Liberal Democrats: Lib Dems 45.6% (+31. Labour 34.1% (-9.2) This is - or was - a Labour safe seat.

And yet still you miss my point. It isn't that there are federalist fundamentalists mouthing off about kicking Britain out. These people - like Juncker and Verhofstadt - are politicians from Benelux countries that have always been richly rewarded by EU membership. The point is, the fundamentalists - also including Michel Barnier, the negotiator for the Commission - are in all the controlling positions for negotiating Brexit. The German pragmatists are nowhere. This means there will be the strongest push by the EU to inflict maximum damage to the UK during Brexit negotiations and beyond. Brexiteer fantasies about German car makers not allowing this to happen are just that - hopeless fantasies. Senior politicians like Hammond recognise this, which is why he made a firm commitment yesterday to exempt bankers from free movement restrictions. Now other sectors are asking what's so special about bankers - and why can't they have the same deal. He's done this because of the predatory noises coming out from the federalists, that they want to destroy London as the financial centre of Europe. You might think: so what? Well, the taxman and provincials unable to withstand the heat of metropolitan life depend on London for revenues. Hammond knows that a damaged service sector in London is a damaged UK. (As a comparison, New York keeps 50% of tax revenues raised in the city, and Tokyo 70%. London by contrast retains just 7% of tax revenues generated within the city; the rest goes to you lovelies). Now, as has been proved countless times, London itself has a boundless talent for making money, and it'll be fine, although not necessarily fine from banking revenues. The rest of the country, on the other hand, will catch a nasty backlash. As the government inevitably fades out farm subsidies after 2020, as well as regional development grants (measured now in billions), and as London demands it should keep a greater proportion of its tax revenues to pay for the infrastructure to enable it to compete post-Brexit, you in hand-out heaven are going to be in serious trouble. So you Brexiteers might want to actually have some plans to hand to deal with this - or are you going to go on as you have, blindly bulldozering on with no hint of an idea about how Brexit can happen in the real world?

Intelligent and well-rounded human beings would address the points made in my post, rather than - as here - solidly proving my hypothesis about Brexiteers. So you humans have no view at all on Banks saying he wants Norway with all the freedom of movement that entails? Interesting. You have no view about what the 'other side' are increasingly saying? I wonder if you have a view about what the Japanese are saying? After all, companies, like Nomura, Toyota, Nissan, Honda and Softbank are kind of a big deal. And the Japanese government is not exactly pulling its punches about what they're all going to do, which is what they've always done: plant themselves in a convenient place inside the EU's single market. That's the thing about Brexiteers though - they are solipsists, with no conception of what the opponents of their position in Europe and elsewhere can do to them. The world isn't waiting to say: 'yes, of course' to every pleading from May et al. That, I would have thought, is what's behind Banks' capitulation.

Uh-oh. The Brexiteers are losing their nerve. Arron Banks, the hardliner who bankrolled the ukippy version of the Leave campaign (your mensch, Tender), is now saying we should go for the 'Norway' option. That option, remember, is the one that has membership of the single market - with membership costs but no say - plus freedom of labour movement with the tiniest of tweaks. https://twitter.com/IanDunt/status/773885526680231936 This is happening just as opinion against a 'good' deal for Britain, like the Norway option, is hardening in the EU. Here's a fascinating take on that by a leading EU negotiator for Brexit - saying that Brexit offers a brilliant opportunity to kick a nuisance country out, with maximum prejudice, and harmonise more strongly those that remain. Brexiteers will feel their knees jerking at this, and will instantly respond that this is precisely the reason we're getting out. But remainers - more intelligent and rounded human beings - will recognise it for what it is: a growing determination to make an example of Britain, cherry-pick and export the best bits (like financial services) to Germany, France, etc., and to leave the UK behind as an isolated, tariff-laden backwater, forced to do deals hugely against its interests with countries like the US and China. https://twitter.com/GuyVerhofstadt/status/769950772561928192

There will be a second referendum on Brexit. It's called the 2020 general election. The UK won't have left by then, for technical reasons that Brexit's great architects have, of course, failed to take into account. The largest of those is exiting from the EU budget, which presently runs to 2020. As the specialist lawyer David Allen Green has spelt out in the FT, trying to negotiate an early exit from the budget - say, 2018 or 2019 - will slow up the whole process of exit negotiations. To get that early exit, there would have to be unanimous agreement with the 27 members states and EU institutions, which will add vastly to the burden of exiting from the EU itself. Accepting a natural end, in 2020, would be far quicker than aiming for earlier. In the meantime, and in the words of Harold Macmillan, "events, dear boy..."

David Davis's front-bench statement on the single market is - I quote - "not government policy". http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/sep/06/david-davis-single-market-stance-not-government-policy Davis, to remind you, is the Secretary of State for Brexit. Jesus wept.

Well quite. That post was virtue-signalling dialled up to a screeching 11. On which subject - the protest at City airport this morning is a good model for how the Corbyn cult, with its incessant appetite for co-opting protests into its own 'movement', is distorting and destroying legitimate campaigns. The all-white protestors occupying the runway were doing so in the name of UK Black Lives Matter. BLM is, of course, originally a campaign in the US which seeks to bring about change after a terrifying string of police shootings of black men, women and children. They demand that local policing and the US criminal justice system be reformed to stop the killings. Translated to the UK, it's been swamped by an altogether different campaign slogan: CLIMATE CHANGE IS RACIST! UK Black Lives Matter released a video to support their claim (on the following twitter feed) https://twitter.com/clakklaa/status/773061999752310785 It begins, in classic Corbynist, 'ram-packed' fashion, with an outright lie, claiming that Britain has the highest per capita output of greenhouse gases. In fact, the UK is way down the list and falling - it barely makes the top 25. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions This list admittedly only includes data on CO2 emissions, and leaves out other greenhouse gases like methane. But unless Brits are farters on a truly epic, planet-shifting, scale, it's not going to make much difference to the data. Then it claims that 'seven out of the top ten' countries affected by climate change are in sub-Saharan Africa. As the top 10 includes places like the Alps, the Great Barrier Reef, Pacific islands and atolls like Kiribati, the Gulf Coast, the Northwest Passage, that's a lie too. Uganda and Darfur do make the list - Uganda for deforestation (not caused by the West but by the country's own burgeoning population, which has destroyed two-thirds of the country's forests in the last twenty years), and Darfur for war (an ethnic-cleansing war waged by central Sudanese government and Arab militias against local African populations - again absolutely nothing to do with the 'racist' West). UK BLM then makes the weird argument that since people actually catching planes at City airport are wealthier than the people who live near it, there should be no airport expansion. This despite the fact that major airports are economic drivers, and are major, and often pretty good, employers - and you'd be pushed to claim that a whites-only policy applies in recruitment. Naturally, Corbyn himself will be on a platform at the Stand Up to Racism conference next month, at which support will be declared for the campaigning of UK Black Lives Matter.

There is a big difference though - in the logic failure of the present government position on Brexit, summed up by Davis. In the Commons today, he said people in Britain voted 'decisively' for Brexit - and now they want to know what it means. Doesn't that feel ever so weirdly the wrong way around? Isn't it normal to figure out what something is or means, and then vote for it?

Iain McNicol, the Labour party general secretary, has just given some choice examples of Corbyn's "kinder, gentler politics" in action. The following are all from registered Labour members or three-quidders. "I would cut Tony Blair's eyes out and set him on fire the murdering cu nt. 1 million deaths on his hands. Fu ck him." "If the PLP forcibly replace Corbyn with some Blairite cu nt I'll cancel my membership and never vote for them again." "If there were any justice this murderous lying bastard would be hung...What a disgraceful excuse for a Labour MP you are - you're a 'sneering traitor'." And so on and so forth. These delightful individuals and many more of similar ilk won't be getting a vote in the leadership election. Corbyn and McDonnell are incensed about this outrageous denial of their voting rights.

More great news for the Corbyn cultists - their Dear Leader is now breaking records! In the latest Survation poll, he has opened up a 64 point gap between him and Theresa May. May has an approval rating of a measly +33.6, while Jezza has outdone himself with -30.7. A difference of 64 points. This is an outstanding achievement. I think he's doing it deliberately, to see how unpopular and useless it's possible to be and still be a major party leader. Jez-he-bloody-well-can is also less popular than May in every single age category - an unheard of achievement for Jeremy. He even gets into plus territory with one age group: among 18-24s he has a rating of +2.8. (May's is +13.6, but let's not dwell on that.) In all other age groups, he's firmly in the red, achieving a brilliant -53.1 among 55+ voters. Among non-voters in the 2015 election, he is really grabbing hearts and minds. As we know from the cultists, this is going to be his real achievement, evidenced by the wild adoring crowds at his rallies. His approval rating among 2015 non-voters is -15.7. Just one word: unbelievable. http://www.pollingdigest.com/home/2016/9/2/may-vs-corbyn-survation

Link to the polls... http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/voting-intention-2

There's never been a moment's doubt from any reasonable observer that Corbyn was going to win the leadership election. Smith is simply not a very impressive candidate. Corbyn is far, far less so, but is surrounded by his adoring cult. He can get away with being a serial liar, stunningly incompetent, unprincipled, and a couldn't-care-less bystander during the wave of Jew-hating sweeping through the worst of his new acolytes. It all makes him yet more popular. If you break the YouGov poll down, it's interesting that among longstanding party members - people who actually support and have worked for Labour - Smith is the more popular candidate. That's not a measure of Smith's popularity but a clear-sighted understanding that Corbyn is a ruinous leader, whose idiocy will destroy the party. It's only when you count those who've been members or three-quidders over the last few months does Corbyn races into the lead. Were he to lose, many of these new characters would sidle off with him - they're Corbyn supporters, not Labour supporters. These same supporters are the ones screeching that because Corbyn can win an election where the majority of the voters are fawning devotees, he can win a general election. A more preposterous, deluded excuse for a thought is hard to imagine. Yet they believe it - but only by Orwellian-scale rewriting of plain facts. One corker is the claim that the childishly named 'chicken coup' is the sole reason Corbyn is not sailing ahead of the Tories in the opinion polls. Here is a list of all opinion polls on the balance of the two main parties since 2010. Under the genius that wasn't Ed Miliband, Labour often had polling numbers up in the mid-40s. Since Corbyn came to power, they've been languishing around the high 20s/low 30s - the sort of numbers that will all but wipe Labour out in a general election. These numbers are bad, regardless of the timing of the supposed 'coup' (it was only ever a coup in the minds of the conspiro-loons among the Corbynists, who witter on about 'Portland Communications' and other supposed plots). Translated into seats at the next GE, and assuming that boundaries are redrawn, we're looking at a Labour party with 80-100 seats (from 230 now), with precious little representation in the north outside of the major cities, nothing at all in Scotland, heavy falls in Wales, and nothing at all in the South East outside of London. Labour will, it is true, be much more in Corbyn's image - a London-centric, middle-class, virulently anti-Western protest cult uninterested in the whole point of the Labour party as a parliamentary force for change. But there's precious little prospect of the party recovering from the Corbyn delusion for a decade at least.

Does anyone feel just a little bit complicit in a rather hysterical media-and-fan circus about deadline day signings and the whole window thing? Past experience suggests that it's often the clubs that bring in large numbers of players who struggle (e.g. Norwich), and flag-waving investments prove duffers (just one of many examples: Niasse for £13.5m to Everton in January; not worthy of even a shirt number in August).

Expectancy is the greatest obstacle to life. (Seneca - who couldn't count)

Which voice in your head told you this?

The real problem, aside from the fact that Corbyn straight-out lied (hardly a novel feature among politicians), is that the stunt was truly hopeless. Virgin East Coast is not a line that suffers from overcrowding anything like as bad as that on other lines. Nor is its customer service that bad (actually it's mostly very good). It does have problems with breakdowns of air-con, wifi, etc., but a lot of that is attributable to something that's uncomfortable for the Corbyn cult to accept: that Directly Operated Railways, the public-owned body which ran the service very well, did not invest in new rolling stock. They weren't allowed to under the terms of their take-over after the National Express default. Of course, this meant that if they ran the service well they'd return healthy revenues back to the exchequer. Which they did. But it put back rolling-stock investment by years. You might want to see this as a warning for Corbyn's desperately knee-jerky call for nationalisation. There are so many things wrong with Corbyn's excuse for a policy on this but I don't want to turn this into a three-volume post. Suffice to say that like nationalisation in years past, you only need a Tory government to follow a Labour one to undo everything, and, on past record, you only need a Labour government to oversee a transport system with benign neglect. Anyone who remembers British Rail - I mean truly remembers what it was like to use on a daily basis - will know what it was like. If not, try this (made by someone deeply sympathetic to BR's continuing public ownership): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sULj6UpGAyU

From the Guardian: In short-tempered exchanges with amused journalists, Mr Corbyn today rejected claims that he was forced to sit on a train floor because his pants were on fire. He made it clear that the real reason was because his wife had misunderstood a comment by an aide that Corbyn's approval rating was on the floor. In fact the leader's record negative rating had already been flushed down the train's toilet before their journey had even begun. The same aide was forced to deny rumours that Mr Corbyn had agreed to make a guest appearance on "Would I Lie to You"? "Jeremy won't even consider any show that's not presented by Ant and Dec", Seumas said, on condition of anonymity.