Be Excellent To Each Other

Pretty sure it will come to be known as a Gazchap border.

What's fascinating about this proposal is that it throws into stark relief one of the core choices Britain has to make when it comes to Brexit. Is it going to apply European standards or American ones? They have dodged this question throughout the last year, but here we see them finally being forced to confront it. If we sign up to European standards on food, chemical safety, digital rights, pharmaceuticals and the rest, we're of little use to the US. If we don't, we will have completely disconnected ourselves from our largest trading partner. The cake-and-eat-it theory is finally meeting the cold light of reality.

I've just realised that when the customs talks fail, the government will spin it as 'bonkers Eurocrats want to stop your booze cruise' rather than, say, a complete and utter failure of policy planning or negotiation.

DAVID Davis is preparing to attack Brussels negotiators for being “stubborn and unreasonable” in a bid to create a split between them and EU.
The Brexit Secretary’s broadside is being drawn up after senior British officials revealed they expect a third round of face to face EU exit talks in the Belgian capital next week to again end in bitter stand-off

A satisfyingly unambiguous statement on Brexit by Labour, which now gives us a clear choice between the Tories' plan which appears to be to blow everything up in an economic clusterfuck of biblical proportions, or a Labour policy that gives us a reasonable chance of surviving the Brexit process with the economy intact.

Keir Starmer could prove to be a great electoral asset for Labour, I think. The smart money would be on letting him be Labour's face of Brexit, and leave Corbyn to do the campaigning he's so good at.

https://www.theguardian.com/global/2017 ... ost-brexit

Has nobody assessed if the NHS could cope with a sudden influx of retirees from Spain?

The price of their support has been to split Britain down the middle. Whatever side you cleave to, can we at least agree that, as the pound sinks towards parity with the euro and real wages fall, our country is in a perilous position? With effectively a year left to complete the article 50 negotiations there is no progress worth mentioning. If nothing changes, we will either crash out of the EU with no plan for the future or be forced to admit that Brussels can do as it pleases. This isn’t an argument between Remainers and Leavers but between realists and fantasists.

May joined the fantasists the moment she entered Downing Street and I wonder if she can ever break free. By pandering to the right, she has increased the power of the right and made the only story that millions hear the story that the right wants to tell.

Step away from the liberal world for a moment and walk in the shoes of Leave supporters. They won a democratic vote and cannot see why we cannot just impose immigration controls and cut all links without paying a penny.

No one in the government has hammered home the uncomfortable truth that clearly we will have to pay a divorce bill if we want to extract concessions from the EU on trade and jobs. Clearly, too, the EU will try to push it as high as it can. Instead, May has struck fantastical poses: that the European court of justice can have no say in British life, for instance, even though dozens of legal and trade agreements have it as the court of final appeal.

Step away from the liberal world for a moment and walk in the shoes of Leave supporters. They won a democratic vote and cannot see why we cannot just impose immigration controls and cut all links without paying a penny.

That's the part that worries me most. All those people are going to feel betrayed and even more disillusioned with the system, leaving opportunities for any cynical and exploitative demagogue wanting to ride to victory.

And then came the oldest, most foolish Brexit delusion of all - that the UK should prepare to walk away from the talks.

No-one who proposes this ever mentions how they plan to maintain flights from or to UK airports without an agreement on Open Skies, or transport nuclear materials without an agreement on Euratom, or get goods into and out of Britain without customs infrastructure in place on the Channel, or allow people to leave and enter the UK without an immigration system designed for them. The notion that the Europeans could be bluffed into capitulation by us threatening to blow our own face off would be laughable if it were not leading us so relentlessly towards the very real possibility that we might actually do it.

Today parliament returns, led by the most dangerously incompetent and decadent government in modern times. This parliament will seal the country’s fate permanently and, on current form, fatally: nothing in the conduct of Brexit suggests any understanding of the cataclysm ahead. Instead the summer has seen only callow jockeying for position between would-be Tory leaders of unbelievable unsuitability.

Their frivolity was summed up by David Davis dismissing EU negotiator Michel Barnier as “silly”. But silliness is now Britain’s official position. Those who holidayed in the EU this summer will have met that amazement from taxi drivers, bartenders, students and old-timers alike: they think we are mad. And so we are. What else can they make of a country with Boris Johnson as foreign secretary? According to Sunday’s Survation poll, he is favourite to take over from Theresa May, with Jacob Rees-Mogg in second place. As if despairing of politics, many voters seem to prefer any alternative reality to the one we face.

This isn't anything like poker. In poker your hand is secret, in Brexit the hands are abundantly clear to all. They are called official statistics. In fact this is no conventional card game at all. The card you think you have can start to change depending on how you play it. Above all, the main aim of this game is not about creating one single winner, it is about avoiding a situation where everybody loses. With Brexit you are playing five such games simultaneously, the main one with Europe, another with the Cabinet, another with Parliament, yet another with the electorate, and with the animal spirits of British business

It's like a child announcing at the dinner table that they're off to do a big poo.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-04/may-aims-to-advance-brexit-talks-with-speech-in-coming-weeks

From this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/IanDunt/status/905093817946300416

"We made important progress..." Labour benches start laughing.

— Ian Dunt (@IanDunt) September 5, 2017

I think I've said this a bit earlier in the thread, but this entire farce would be genuinely top-tier entertainment, watching an absolute bunch of clueless fucking clowns three miles out of their depth and floundering magnificently - if those same clowns weren't playing fast and loose with the ENTIRE FUCKING COUNTRY and the lives of TENS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE.

One area not yet dealt with in position papers—it is not really a headline issue but it is of particular interest to me—is the protection of our urban trees and our woodlands from imported diseases. In this, Brexit will prove invaluable.
...
There are existing regulations governing the importation of trees into the United Kingdom, but they are far from watertight and are designed to work for countries with land borders with each other, who do much trading of trees across those borders. The regulations are not as tight or rigorously policed as they should be. We are an island, and should make the most possible use of that to protect our trees from infection. It may even be appropriate to revisit the question of a quarantine period for imported trees.

Brexit presents us with a golden opportunity to look at this matter afresh, to put biosecurity at the top of our agenda and ensure we are doing all we can to protect Britain’s trees

Historically, we happen to be rather good at free trade, too. We started as pirates in the 16th century, but have moved on from then. We have been very successful.

Guardian:Boris Johnson: we will still claw back £350m a week after Brexit

Just leaving this here for future reference.