Verbal

As this is the officially 'way forward' thread, could one of you clever Brexiteers answer the question I've now asked several times? How are we going to square the British government's need to be in the single market with the EU's red line on freedom of movement? Anyone? I actually felt sorry for Theresa May this afternoon - Merkel was clearly baffled that the British government has not the faintest idea of how to answer that question themselves. As someone else said, Brexiteers are like a dog catching a bus - it has not a clue what to do next.

Well, it seems we Remainers were wrong all along! The Brexiteers do have a plan! And here it is in full: the Brexit Manifesto (© D. Davis, 2016, all rights reversed). https://medium.com/@mrjasonmehmet/the-brexit-manifesto-f9a421fa3313#.463anxf7q It fills me with confidence that our national administration, with its massive contractual successes including PFI, major IT projects, and pretty much every large-scale defence contract - all of which will rob us blind for decades - will be in full command of a process that dwarfs all of those thousands of times over. And it will do it from a standing start of having precisely zero trade negotiators, and zero actual workable ideas from the Three Brexiteers supposedly in charge of it all. Brilliant!

This pro-Trident speech from Labour MP John Woodcock is getting a lot of praise. His delivery is rather nervous - understandable, really, given the truly bizarre circumstances of having to defend official Labour party policy in the teeth of opposition from his own leader and the unedifying clique around him. But the arguments he makes needed to be engaged with. Listen to the speech, though, to find out what this 'engagement' amounted to from Corbyn et al. Incidentally, the woman sitting just to the left of him is Ruth Smeeth, the Jewish MP who, while being abused at the anti-semitism report press conference, was 'defended' by Corbyn with the sum total of a knowing smirk.

Interesting legal case began today. A Government QC from David Davis's Brexit Dept has told the court that Article 50 won't/can't be triggered before the end of the year. Which of course contradicts what Davis said only last week. The judge (Leveson), pressed the government QC to give a clear summary of the government's position on A50. He couldn't - which wound the judge up no end, demanding that the QC "articulate in the language that is clear." https://twitter.com/JoshuaRozenberg Slip sliding away...

Calling Duckhunter to the thread again (because it's funny) to blindly defend the outright laughable... David Davis now wants a deal with a trading area 150% of the earth's GDP. https://twitter.com/xtophercook/status/754785184290054144 Free trade agreement with Vulcans, perhaps?

Oh dear: Care to retract?

Scoping is about as far as it can go - and not just because the UK is legally prohibited from signing anything until 2019 at the earliest. Oliver Letwin's admission that the British civil service had precisely zero international trade negotiators means we'll have to hire immigrants to get rid of the immigrants. Canada by contrast has 300 trained negotiators, and as skilled as they were it took seven years to reach the point where we are today, with the Canada/EU deal not quite done. Brexit means we'll have to do these incredibly complex deals dozens of times over. Still, it'll take as long as it takes, or as long as the long grass grows. For some weird reason, Brexit's fanboys seem to think that if they have the willpower they can get it all done. In their naiveté they're about to get royally screwed over by other countries' far, far more skilled (in that they exist!) negotiating teams. I bet the American pharmaceutical industry can't wait - especially when they discover that the SoS for Brexit, David Davis, just two months ago didn't know that by law we can't negotiate with individual EU countries. Heaven spare us these idiots.

It's depressing to see the outpouring of ignorance after events like these. This is a prime if small example of profound, immoveable, dangerous stupidity. 'Islam' is and isn't many things. It isn't a centralised religion with a theocratic hierarchy. There is no Muslim 'pope'. This means, sadly, that any number of people, usually for the worst, can leap up and claim to be acting on behalf of 'Islam'. Islam is incredibly diverse, and with a history so rich that many basic Western ideas in science, politics and even the ethics of war derive directly from Muslim scholarship (For example, the Italian Renaissance - Michelangelo and all - wouldn't have been possible without Arab theories of mathematics and optics). We all stand on the shoulders of giants - some of the best of them were Muslim. Islam is incredibly diverse in religious form. The Glasgow shopkeeper, Asad Shah, was an Ahmadi, a faith so liberal it would be tolerated by many C of E devotees. 'Islam' is in the grip of a particularly virulent form of reactionary theology, Wahhabism, which originated with an especially violent thug (called Wahhab) in the Arabian peninsula in the 18th century. The reason - and the only one - it now holds such sway over so much of the world is down to one thing: oil. Asad Shah's killer was an adherent of a version of this. Whoever the idiot was who dismissed Muslims as 'collateral', should know that's utterly false. Despite yesterday's appalling attack, the overwhelming percentage of victims of Muslim extremist violence are other Muslims. They are not collateral. They are the targets. Asad Shah was not collateral. He was the target. The bombs you see going off with monotonous frequency in Baghdad are targeting Muslims. They are not dying as if by some unfortunate accident. The dozens of schoolchildren killed in their classrooms in Peshawar last year were targets. No one accidentally left the safety off. The attack on the Istanbul airport was aimed at anyone who happened to present themselves as an easy kill. No one asked what religion they were, and of course most were Muslims. As targets, they deserve but don't get our support. Consequently, Sufism, a remarkably peaceful (and soft-drug-friendly, hence Kabul was the terminus of the hippy trail) variant of Islam that was dominate in Afghanistan until the 1970s, has been wiped out by Saudi-financed and 'educated' hordes of crazed Islamists. The same thing is currently happening in Pakistan, where Sufi shrines - great pieces of architecture in themselves - are being destroyed and their worshippers murdered and forced out by sheer terror. What actually should happen - even in our own interests in the West - is that the diversity and richness of Islam should be protected from these lunatics. If we did that, when the Saudis run out of oil, their pernicious, violent, cretinous form of the religion would (I hope to heaven) fade away. The very worst thing we can do now is to whip up an atmosphere of hate and suspicion directed at anyone with a name like 'Mohamed', etc. The worst not just for them but for us. And despite all the bull**** on here about Muslims not 'condemning' or 'apologising for' outrages like Nice, just remember that it's hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, Syrians, Pakistanis, Afghans, Bangladeshis, Kurds, Turks, Lebanese, Indonesians and many others who are actually on the ground fighting the worst of this Wahhabi virus. So the problem isn't 'mainstream Islam'. The problem is the extremes of Islam which have been promulgated and funded among others by a paranoid, fearful, corrupt Royal family in the Arabian peninsula. The victims add up to Islam itself, as a religion that had evolved into great empires and then into a diverse and diffuse faith. And if you take the body count as evidence on who the real targets are, you wouldn't doubt for a second that it's actually not us. We're the sideshow. The real goal is the elimination of any form of the religion that doesn't accord with the lunatic ideas of Wahhab or his natural descendants Bin Laden, Zawahiri, al-Zarqawi and Bagdhadi.

This is a terrific ground-level piece of writing about the conditions, particularly in banlieue districts like St Denis, that have led to the wave of terrorist attacks in France, many of which have been home-grown. (Warning to Corbynistas and far-rightists: the writer, Ben Judah, is Jewish. He's best known for a brilliant book about immigrant life in London: This Is London). https://medium.com/@b_judah/islam-and-the-french-republic-from-the-banlieus-to-le-pen-land-92d8a1fbf0e0#.l1r916q9u Judah paints a picture that is far at odds with what we experience in the UK: a country that is deeply fractured, with extremist Islamists and far-right extremists (whose ideology appeals clearly to a number of dimwits on here) jacking up the barriers of ferocious mutual hostility. Some of the statistics are truly shocking, especially the effects on the Jewish community, who are, metaphorically speaking, the canaries in the coal mine: In 2014, 51% of ALL reported racist attacks in France were against Jews. On average, one Jew a day is assaulted. 74% of Jews in skullcaps and 20% of those without reported racist attacks. And since the HyperCache attack in Paris, 10,000 French army troops and 5,000 police guard Jewish-owned buildings. Judah also conveys with awful clarity the horrors of the banlieue, and the way this helps shape the radicalisation of young extremists, providing a kind of echo chamber for the lunatic Salafists winding up the anti-French hysteria, just as the French far-right wind up the anti-immigrant hysteria on their borders. Depressing.

That was not a prediction. This is a prediction. Now back to my unanswered question to the Brexit fanboys. How do you reconcile this government's commitment to the internal market (as advocated for example by our new Foreign Comedian BoJo) with the 'take back control' demand for an end to free movement of people in the EU, which is a red line for Brussels? As you Brexiters seem totally stumped, here's a brilliantly useful article which spells out how it's far, far worse than you even imagined to achieve any kind of Brexit at all. I mean ever. http://www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2016/07/14/everything-you-need-to-know-about-theresa-may-s-brexit So here's my new prediction: "Brexit means Brexit" means we'll have to fudge things so that the 2020 general election becomes the mechanism for burying this whole sordid mess.

What's wrong with you? I said just a few posts back that I - along with CB Fry I believe - had predicted Leave would win. It was pretty obvious that the cacophony of lies and xenophobic distortions by the Brexit campaign would take its toll. So what about an answer to my question? Internal market or restrictions on free movement?

So have any of you Brexiter bright sparks come up with how you're going to reconcile having to be in the internal market (no Tory government, least of all this one, is going to go ahead with Brexit without that) with the EU's flat-out refusal to budge on free movement of people? If not, someone's going to have an awful lot of explaining to do about 'taking back control'. For the kippers and worse among you (and you know who I mean), how's that going to make you feel, if actually the Tories can do absolutely nothing about 'tightening up' the immigration rules for people inside the EU?

Yet another reason (as if there weren't already a bucketful) for Corbyn to be held in utter contempt. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p041bhvf/player Listening to this interview it's hard to even fathom that an individual like this could be a public figure at all, let alone a leader of what was once one of Britain's great political parties.

More direction-of-travel news... Although it's attracted little attention, the locking-up of commercial property investment vehicles is a kind of business run on the bank, and will feed into problems in the wider economy because small and medium firms secure loans on commercial property and now will find it very hard to do so. Even less attention though has been given to the triggering of Brexit break clauses on property deals. One in three (!) pending commercial property deals has fallen through after the Brexit vote. http://news.sky.com/story/millions-wiped-off-commercial-property-market-10499768?dcmp=snt-sf-twitter And to make sure the harm is long-term, a senior Tory who's probably going to be central to Brexit planning now predicts it could all take six years before Britain is finally out. That means the 2020 election is more and more likely to be an EU in-or-out campaign. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/12/brexit-could-take-up-to-six-years-to-complete-says-philip-hammond Finally, the "Australian points-based system" pumped up by the Leave campaign seems more and more unlikely. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jul/12/uk-immigration-system-not-points-based-minister Not that this is a surprise. There was never any prospect of reconciling access to the internal market with the adoption of a highly restrictive system like the Australian one. The Leave campaign just flat-out lied about this, and now the liars have all ****ed off the lies will have to be undone.

This is meshugge, Lord Tender - completely ferplunjit. The legal cases are about how Article 50 is triggered, whether by royal prerogative or by Parliament. They've got nothing to do with hopeless arguments about whether or not the referendum is binding. Even the most rabid of Leadsom's supporters don't think that, and Leadsom's own campaign manager believes that it should be done by Act of parliament. Have you got someone in your house who can help you with your posts? Because you seem very Fertummelt. Meanwhile, here's a cartoon for you to stare at: https://twitter.com/BlackHalt/status/752814885537509376

I wonder if the Brexiteers' dogmatism totally excludes the possibility that even they may have a re-think, especially if the outcome of Brexit talks gets practically nowhere and seems on balance a backward step. Given the EU's red lines, and the Tories' twin desires to be in the internal market and to 'control' immigration, the outcome of negotiations may look broadly like this: 1. Access to the internal market, but only on terms offered to other non-EU countries with access. This will mean that the UK's contribution to the EU budget will be calculated as it is now, but without the rebate. So the costs of access to the internal market will be higher - they really will be £350m a week - than they are currently while we remain in the EU. 2. Access to the internal market means signing up to the 'four freedoms'. At no point have the EU ever conceded substantial ground on this. One of those freedoms of course is free movement of people. Therefore no immigration controls for people from EU member states, although we will probably be able to negotiate something like the Norwegian rules, which don't amount to a whole lot: http://www.lifeinnorway.net/move/immigration/immigration-europe/ In truth, we could probably negotiate the Norwegian rules and remain in the EU. 3. The City retains its passporting privileges. As the continued financial health of the City is likely to be essential to the UK's negotiating position, the EU will have a lot of leverage on a liberal interpretation of the other freedoms, including freedom of movement for people - much more than say Norway. 3. No participation in an EU army. Again, we could negotiate this now and remain EU members, and there's no certainty that it'll happen anyway. 4. No voting rights within the EU, including on matters like enlargement. So while the UK government can presently veto the EU membership of Turkey, for example,it won't be able to post-Brexit, and, because of freedom of movement, will have no power to prevent Turkish citizens coming into the country if Turkey does join (the latter which I still find highly unlikely). 5. The UK is bound by EU trade agreements. This will place limits of negotiable strength on the UK's ability to negotiate independently elsewhere. Of course, non-EU countries negotiating trade agreements with the UK will be wary of granting the UK better trading terms than those available to EU states - the EU is the big gorilla and the stand-alone UK the mouse in all this. Once this has all been explained to the British electorate, minus the ravings of the now-exited Brexit leaders, what do you think their reaction will be? It'll be worth it to pay more, with less say, to lose yet more control over immigration? Much could (and will) happen in the time it takes to trigger Article 50 and for negotiations to really begin. We could see the end of Jean-Claude Juncker, whom Merkel wants out, and therefore the his peculiar (and personally rather unpleasant) brand of Euro-fundamentalism. We may even see the a currency crisis (although the Eurozone has survived through pretty terminal-seeming crises so far). And of course we don't actually know anything concrete yet about the British government's negotiating position. Despite the fact that Brexit is the most complex and largest administrative challenge to the British civil service since rearmament in the 1930s, it's actually quite stunning that the political planning (as opposed to the BoE's economic planning) for Brexit has been practically non-existent. As we now know, this planning is now firmly in the hands of Remaina May, with her meaningless 'Brexit means Brexit' slogan (change the noun to something like 'Biscuits means biscuits' and you get the idea). And as Brexiteers are probably dimly aware, the moral force of the referendum goes off with time - if 'a week is a long time in politics', as Harold Wilson famously said, what's two-plus years?

How it's stacking up, direction-of-travel-wise: 1. The Cabinet Office remains hopeful of having a 'multidimensional" options paper by a September deadline. 2. Remaina May becomes Prime Minister, with her timetable for Brexit negotiations starting in the New Year. So no Article 50 notification this year 3. The earliest possible time for any Article 50 notification is in early 2017. So no Article 50 notification this year 4. With the two-year timetable after any A50 negotiation, the earliest any government could take Britain out of the EU would be 2019, shortly before the next General Election.

And she's gone. Pretty impressive work by the British establishment. Brexiters have now lost all their leading candidates. It's hard to disagree with the Guardian's judgement:

When this thread began almost a year ago I didn’t think it was possible the party would split. Now it’s inevitable, even if Corbyn loses a legal challenge to be on the ballot. The party as a parliamentary force has been marginalised, and Labour is now predominantly an extra-parliamentary foreign-affairs protest organisation with strong alliances with the Trotskyist far-left – something that Corbyn has always wanted. As such, the party has abandoned being what it’s been since its inception – a party campaigning for social justice through parliamentary representation. Going to the country in a general election with Corbynism, whether it’s in 2016 or 2020, would be a disaster. Corbyn’s couldn’t-care-less performance in the referendum campaign wasn’t because he didn’t care about the EU; it was because he was incapable of being other than he is – a campaigner against the evils of Westernism. His natural instinct was to side with Putin in the view that the EU was a vehicle for western menace (this freakishly bizarre view is commonplace among the worst of the Corbyn fanatics). With the Labour party infested with Corbynisim, they should be left to it – and, stripped of the bulk of its parliamentary party, the Corbynist iteration of the party will rot from the head down. What’s needed now is for the centre-left’s energies to be focused positively on the immediate and long-term future, not embroiled in interminable existential battles with the Corbyn fanatics and their weird Jew-hating tics. That means the parliamentary Labour party (or almost all of it) forming a new party. It should seek alliances with other centre-left parties, including the SNP, to form an electoral coalition. This isn’t a rerun of the gang-of-four split from Labour in 1981, both because the numbers are so much bigger (such a massive vote of no confidence against its leader is unprecedented in Labour’s history) and because the party is in such worse shape even than under Foot. It’s also not like the SDP split because such a move now would restore Labour as a parliamentary party, with MPs answerable to their constituents rather than the pitchfork wavers at Corbyn’s disposal. I honestly don’t think there’s an alternative – unless that alternative is decades of a vastly unpopular Tory government taking advantage of a hopelessly split non-Tory majority.

She doesn't stand a chance. The Corbyn cultists now infect the party like an untreatable virus. I know Neil Kinnock is keen to wage a fight within the party, but when he did so in the 1980s it took him over a decade to drive the entryists out, and there were far fewer of them then. Yet Corbyn remains enfeebled. He has the support of fewer MPs than the SNP, and should by rights give way to the SNP as the main party of Opposition in the House of Commons. We'd all be better off for that. I think the only - and now best - option is to form a new centre-left party. It's the only way to create an effective opposition in the time available. Political and economic crises will be piling up in the next few weeks and months, and the only people in a position to take advantage of the chaos are likely to the right wing of the Tory party. We don't have time for a Kinnock long march. Viva la New New Labour! (I don't expect it'll be called that...)

Oy vey, be a mensch and have another go at drafting this, would you? Try to reorder it to make sense. It says something, though, that even with your posts the standard of debate on Saintsweb is actually higher than that coming from the Leadsom camp (and 'camp' is by no means a reference to gay marriage or anything that may offend Leadsom's loathsome all-encompassing 'Christians'). Next excitement from Leadsom HQ - her tax returns, which were promised five days ago. Wonder why they're so late? And the next opportunity for head-exploding apoplexy and threats of Brexiter violence comes up in a few days, with this preliminary hearing: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/08/legal-attempt-prevent-brexit-preliminary-hearing-article-50 The first of many. Enjoy!

Nope, still don’t know whether you’re lying or being plain ignorant. And now you’re trying to rewrite your earlier post to wriggle out of looking a bit of a pudding. You didn’t say “The referendum is advisory but Parliament WILL follow it” (an argument which is still in principle false). You said: “Parliament voted to hand its sovereignty over EU member to the people via a referendum.” Which is complete tosh. And your contention that the time to have had that argument was before the Remain case narrowly lost is also plainly false. The referendum bill was whipped through Parliament and the other parties not only voted against it but campaigned against it in the 2015 general election. What’s wrong with you that you don’t remember this? You merely echo by ill-informed accident the central contradiction in the Brexiteers’ case: you stormed in high dudgeon into the voting booth to demand among many other things a return of sovereignty to Parliament, and now you get upset when you realise that precisely that Parliamentary sovereignty trumps a referendum result. And let’s be clear about what that Parliamentary sovereignty means. In the words of Edmund Burke (remember him?): “Your (elected) representative owes you not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” Burke's principle is fundamental to British parliamentary sovereignty (which, contrary to BoJo's serial lies, was not handed en masse to Brussels - Brussels has merely become the scapegoat for British governments' failures). So you can’t complain when MPs, who are predominantly pro-Remain, exercise their judgement independently of the referendum result. It’s entirely possible that they’ll exercise that judgement to repeal the European Communities Act. Let’s wait and see, but don’t hold your breath. But there is certainly nothing that ensures, or should ensure, that Parliament (in your rather hysterical caps) WILL merely reflect the referendum result. Underlying this all though is that the only people who wanted a referendum were the internecine warriors of the Tory party and the far right. No one else – certainly not me – has ever said it was a sensible or appropriate thing to do. Who else gives a **** about the Tories’ local difficulties? The referendum demonstrates how undemocratic this form of decision-making really is. And it’s no accident that plebiscites and referendums are popular with dictators. Although this referendum was about a single question – Leave/Remain – it was about a whole host of issues, some explicit, some lurking beneath the surface. They included: sovereignty, immigration, economic decline, hatred of London’s success, issues of independence (Scotland), hatred of an unpopular government and ‘elites’, raging at experts, ‘global capitalism’ (for the Corbyn cultists), and so on. Yet for all those issues, we get a simple binary result: the winner (so the Brexiteers fervently hope) takes absolutely all. And it’s undemocratic because if you apply this principle to a general election, the party winning by a national vote of 4 percent would take all 650 seats. The 48 percent of voters who went for other options would have no voice whatsoever – zero Parliamentary seats. That is about as undemocratic as it gets. Oh, and one more bit of bad news and evidence of your failing memory: I predicted a Brexit win. Go and have a look on the referendum thread if you’re really that obsessed. The prediction was made in response to that great defender of Jew haters, Wes “A Jew” Tender. But ultimately this isn’t about what you want or what I want. The reason you’re going to struggle to get your way, no matter how big your tantrums, isn’t because of noises from the disenfranchised 48 percent. It’s because the British establishment is actually quite skilled in steering things round to its way. And its way is to remain. That’s why the Tory leadership contest is the set up as it is. The two most powerful Leavers have imploded – the Gove/Johnson dream team, which would have swept the party membership, is ignominious history. An establishment pillar in Theresa May is facing exactly the candidate the British establishment would have wanted: a comedy candidate with so many skeletons in her cupboard there’s enough material to trash her for the entirety of the next nine weeks (including, I hear, some huge hostages to fortune in recent TV interviews, which are about to be exposed, as well as tax arrangements from hell). If Theresa May wins, she is in no hurry to trigger Article 50 – and won’t until the damage to the British economy of Brexit is fully evident. At which point – well, let’s say this is an unfair contest.

This is simply factually incorrect. As with all Brexiteers, I don't know whether you're saying this as a straight-faced lie or out of ignorance. Legally, this referendum result cannot trump parliamentary sovereignty. Here's a helpful fact-check for you, written on the day of the referendum and before (obviously) the result was known. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/23/eu-referendum-legally-binding-brexit-lisbon-cameron-sovereign-parliament Interesting, too, that the idea of a second referendum was actually been floated by some leavers, because they (among them Johnson) saw the vote as a means of leveraging a better deal out of Brussels.

Not really needed, John B. At the time of the Scottish referendum it was government policy to oppose independence. Yet they still produced a highly detailed 670-page-long document planning all the steps needed to implement a Yes vote. Compare and contrast with Brexit. No such document exists. There are no steps. What does that tell you? Never underestimate the power of the British establishment. Even when it gets something wrong it has ways and means of steering things back to its position.

More direction-of-travel news... 1. The British political establishment have finagled the Tory leadership election, with the 'dream team' of Gove and Johnson now successfully consigned to the scrapheap, leaving a Leave candidate of such risible non-qualities that she counts as little more than a comedy candidate, whose serial lies and fantasies will be picked apart during the coming campaign. (That she attracts whoops of joy from rabid Brexiteers makes the coup all the more invisible.) 2. Government lawyers who might otherwise be spending their waking hours on a Brexit strategy - the biggest bureaucratic change of course since the second world war - are presently wrapped up with the coincidentally timed Chilcot report and its fall-out - all those lessons to be learned, checks and balances to be installed. It seems they don't have time even to prepare a brief for the first legal challenge, now before the courts, against the idea that the European Communities Act can be repealed by any body other than both Houses of a pro-Remain Parliament. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/05/deadline-approaches-government-response-brexit-legal-challenge-article-50