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[Hiberno-Britannic Politics] Their Worstest Hour
Bogart
Streetwise HerculesRegistered User, Moderator Mod Emeritus
Streetwise HerculesRegistered User, Moderator Mod Emeritus
So, how about that Brexit, eh?
Discussion of Irish/UK politics goes here. The short version is: bad times.
Here is a link with an explanation of how Parliament works.
A link detailing the Good Friday Agreement, an important thing which stopped people blowing each other up and which is made unsafe by Brexit.
The Guardian Liveblog is always useful to keep up with the day's events and will often have some explanations of some of the weird ins and outs. Click the red Live section to hit the actual blog.
Discussion of Irish/UK politics goes here. The short version is: bad times.
Here is a link with an explanation of how Parliament works.
A link detailing the Good Friday Agreement, an important thing which stopped people blowing each other up and which is made unsafe by Brexit.
The Guardian Liveblog is always useful to keep up with the day's events and will often have some explanations of some of the weird ins and outs. Click the red Live section to hit the actual blog.
Bogart on
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This discussion has been closed.
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Alternatively:
Do not think about The Event.
The Doctor regenerated, we've got Colin Baker now
Ok so extremely simplistic summary
They finally pried the role of Prime Minister out of Teresa May's cold dead hands. Shes now fucked off to dance in her fields.
then we got to watch the Conservative party of them spend i dunno, a month, 2 months? deciding between noted Cockwomble Boris Johnson, and Jeremy Hunt who has been notaccidentally called a cunt live on air by nearly every source of news in the country.
Eventually they decided 'lets appoint the one who we can at least laugh at' and Boris was given his dream job, and the entire country hasn't stopped booing him since.
They want us to fail to reach an agreement, that's why they're refusing to budge on all their unreasonablebasic common sense demands.
IIRC the backstop would move the hard border between RoI and North Ireland to North Ireland and the rest of the UK, until either someone invents magical technology that would allow an open border crossing while simultaneously allowing for the UK to enforce their own trade and customs, or when the UK got it's head out if it's ass and agreed to a final deal that wouldn't require a hard border between RoI and North Ireland.
Tories don't want it because this whole thing is about SOVEREIGNTY and having a treaty that enforces a hard border inside your own country is the exact opposite of that, and, perhaps more importantly, the Unionist DUP that has kept the Tories in power thanks to a supply deal don't want it, because having a hard border with the UK makes it almost inevitable that North Ireland would leave the UK and join Ireland proper, and they don't want to leave the UK.
I can’t say the writing’s very good but I can say that it’s certainly gripping.
The backstop doesn't move the border anywhere, which is the issue. It just guarantees that if no other arrangement is made, NI exists within a customs union with the Republic of Ireland (and the rest of the EU). The ball is entirely in the UK's court then as to whether Northern Ireland get's treated as part of the EU and Ireland rather than the UK, and the hard border is drawn in the Irish sea - or if the UK basically extends it's 'transition period' indefinitely and adopts the same rules to prevent this border.
The latter means you're not able to make trade deals as you have to maintain the seamless custom's union with the EU, but at the same time the UK would have no control over any new EU legislation which it would need to adopt. But if you picked the former, you can bet that Scotland and London will want a bite of that action too - and (far more importantly in their mind) the Tories then lose control of the government as the DUP won't support them.
If the Tories didn't need the DUP to hold onto power, especially if Boris ends up with a majority of 1 on Thursday, then the backstop issue would have been settled way back right after the last election with the "the Irish can go fuck off" strategy.
Not only that, you don't get your Free Port tax havens with the Norway model.
It's nothing to do with the backstop per se, what they're saying is that they'll block one of the UK's desired outcomes of a no deal brexit in order to defend the GFA
Yes, but at one remove
UK says "it's worth the political disruption of a hard border on the island of Ireland to strike a trade deal with the US"
Irish caucus says "we will block any such deal if there is a hard border" (subtext: because the protection of peace on the island is more important to us than a trade deal)
It's another one of these things where, in principle, if any of the hard brexiteers touting "alternative arrangements" to the backstop could actually present a workable proposition, there wouldn't be an issue and the backstop wouldn't be required
However, at this point in time, the backstop is the only workable proposition on the table to avoid a hard border and thus protect the GFA
I think that's what I said? I possibly should have said "customs border" rather than "hard border" but I'm not really seeing anything in your description of the situation that is more than semantically different from mine.
I also wouldn't put it pass Boris to call a GE and run on a not-so-subtle "Fuck the Irish" platform if he thought it would get a him a Tory majority/Brexit coalition that would be okay with abandoning North Ireland entirely and therefore make Brexit easier. Even though that would guarantee UK being demoted to Great Britain and have a good chance of being demoted further to become just England (and Wales... maybe).
So this seems like an unequivocally bad sign. Either we're getting No Deal or we've blown £2 billion on fucking nothing.
The spirit of Grayling lives on.
Steam | XBL
I wonder how much they can realistically do in three months.
Steam | XBL
:P
The consensus appears to be "not enough"
Part of the problem is the sheer unpredictability of second order effects, like the example of national shortages of EU-legal pallets, given that the UK won't be able to stamp their own any more
Oh it's likely to be too little too late but it's actually doing something that isn't (in theory) can kicking so I feel obliged to support it at least a little bit.
If worse comes to worst you can always smuggle onions.
The critical difference is that the backstop doesn't place a border, it just imposes conditions that the UK needs to do one of two things to avoid a Hard Brexit after the fact, and that the default assumption is that the UK stays in the transitional phase until things can be fixed.
The Sovereignty issues is then about how long this continues, as we've not drastically disagreed with the EU on most cases and Sudden Hard Brexit is always an option, even if the withdrawal agreement was voted on so it would probably never get so bad that the status quo would drastically change - it's less about having two rules within the borders of the same country, or the central government not having the final say on economic areas within it's notional boundaries (devolution and FUCKING FREE PORTS!), but that this is legitimately something that could continue politically for some time as being something undesirable but not worth the implosion of a No Deal exit.
The Brexiteers are not wrong when they say that the current withdrawal deal is a nightmare, and that the Irish Backstop is integral to it not working. It's just the EU is also not wrong when they say this is the best we can get*.
Only sensible option is to not do this, and maybe do it later when you can fix the issues with technology.
*Well, that might not be true. A genuinely longer term plan could possibly work, and maybe in the benefit of both. Something working towards a two(+)-tier system across the globe where it's a slow phasing out of British involvement in specifically EU affairs whilst more international replacements were strengthened etc. Allowing both economies to adapt to their new roles - but that's not going to get you the two million quid next year that a No Deal can. So fuck it.
I still don't understand what a technological solution to the Irish border issue would even look like.
robot guards
Now, if you mean with technology we actually have, that's another matter.
You can't check crates that you can't catch.
You wouldn't even see it, that's how advanced it would be.
But seriously, if I don't have to do it right now and have an infinite budget - you're looking at police state ID by facial recognition and gait and globally tracked shipping via a common system (unique item in the world, unique barcode - or something blockchain related on a scale that current block chain just can't deal with). Don't forget, we're not pitching real world tech here, just what could be done theoretically in two+ years of an extension period having been able to apply unshackled Johnsonian energetic optimism to the secret perpetual motion machines hidden under Cavendish labs in Cambridge University.
But if everyone is spying on everyone, and we already have data sharing across the globe with passports with biometric information etc, no reason you couldn't have the border exist on the personal level. If you're paying with your phone in Cuba, Coventry and Cork - it can handle the details of any customs arrangements, or void a deal if you've crossed some incompatible threshold (say drugs traffic between US states where it is legal/decriminalised/illegal in different locations). The 'border' applies to individuals and property - not maps.
Right now? Madness, shouldn't enter the conversation as an option. But pay me 10K to give you wild options that might work for the next generations? I'll throw out some crazy ideas, and then you can say you've researched the topic, and these new technical solutions are just around the corner. So might as well Free Port now to get the benefits of No Deal for a year or two and then start working things out with the EU.
a.... wall? /s
Man, most of the, if not all, the Sci-Fi writers were way off on what a dystopian future would like. Only thing they got right was that the wealthy elite would still be fucking scum. They just assumed we'd have flying cars and murderbots. Instead it seems to be that people can't get into a flame war with the leaders of powerful countries on a shitty internet platform, while the residents of the UK are forced to resort to smuggling in onions in an attempt to avoid starvation. I reiterated, this isn't the darkest timeline, it's still pretty dark because most of the world is run by fucking callous idiots, it's just the dumbest fucking dark timeline.
To be more on point, I'm getting the basic gist is that there will be a ton of flailing under Boris, with like fuck all getting done. This will probably lead to his government collapsing and then who the fuck knows how the resulting election plays out, probably likely to get more of the same given the current trend, unless people see some sanity or enough crazies get in to pull the trigger on a bigger shit show.
Don’t discount the possibility of both
most recent yougov poll puts cons up to 32%, about 7% higher than they were before boris
there is a matching 7% shrink in brexit party support
easy to overinterpret but broadly at the moment it looks like unsurprisingly having a farage-style clown leading the cons brings many of those who liked farage back to the cons
shot
chaser
I wondered what that smell was...
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
Can't wait to see how well this ages...
Boris Johnson.
"If the election were held tomorrow, would you vote for A., Jeremy Corbyn, or B., a bucket of warm phlegm?"
"Hmm.... how big is the bucket?"
(Meanwhile, a third of the country are desperately looking for the exits and/or the "none of the above" option.)
Of course they won't because the Corbyn cult IS Labour these days and Saint Jezza can never be wrong, only wronged and all that.