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Politics Today

Alistair20000

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The aptly named Steve Bray, from Port Talbot. A right noisy pain in the arse, who should be muzzled and shackled. 😀

Counter productive to the cause IMO.
Muzzled and shackled ? Oh dear. (n) I though you might have believed in the right to free speech Elgy.
 

IndoMike

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Yes, but how? Interesting piece stolen from Mr Murdoch which certainly rings true. Just like Mrs May, Johnson's government is riven with factions:

Inside No 10 a split and bruised government is divided over how to escape the quagmire it has marched into. By now Boris Johnson and his team had intended to be in the middle of an election campaign, giving him a new mandate for Brexit. Their mismanagement of parliament, party and the public has stymied all that. The government has only six weeks left before its own deadline to leave the EU, do or die. It is struggling not to die.

“They are riven,” says a senior Tory. “There are two schools of thought competing in No 10. The first faction is determined to double down on every legal and political trick, however constitutionally questionable. The second thinks the game is up, and they have to get a deal.”

The diehards are being led by Dominic Cummings and Dominic Raab and the pragmatists by Michael Gove. “Boris is listening to both. He’s undecided which way to go.”
Cummings and Raab think their strategy is the winning one. They know all campaigns stumble and their goal remains unchanged: keep positioning Johnson as the fearless defender of the Brexit cause and he will swing Brexit voters behind him.
Proroguing parliament, being booed in Luxembourg, fighting for the prime minister’s freedom of action in the Supreme Court; in the diehards’ view these are not embarrassments but vital signals to Brexiteers that Johnson is of the true faith. They are gambling that constitutional niceties look bafflingly irrelevant to voters in Middlesbrough or Grimsby who just want Brexit done. And they are prepared to push Johnson’s defiance much further.

The Cummings team are letting rumours swirl that Johnson might refuse to implement the extension law at all if he has no deal in place by October 19, leaving the Supreme Court to order someone else in his government to request it instead. That would allow Johnson to keep his promise of never asking for an extension. It would keep him pure.

If we aren’t out by October 31 and Johnson has refused to concede or co-operate in any way, he can weaponise that by telling the electorate that the malign forces of courts and parliament have boxed him in, and that only the people can set him free. His appeal in the next election, Cummings believes, has to be that he is prepared to fight every kind of establishment — legal, parliamentary and European — in the Brexit cause.
Inside the pragmatists’ team, led by Gove, there is nervousness about pinning the government’s every hope of survival on a policy of relentless defiance. As one anxious insider told me, after October the public might well see a trapped Johnson as a weak and diminished figure rather than a noble one. “If we don’t leave we get a rerun of Theresa May’s problem — a drop in the Tory vote and a big rise in the Brexit one. The only way to be sure we leave is to get a deal, and the quicker the better.”

There is a new and intense focus from the Gove team on finding rapid solutions to all the familiar obstacles; freeing the UK from European control while avoiding hard borders in Ireland and keeping the Union together. Under orders, Whitehall is frantically scrabbling around for proposals but, as one insider pointed out, if Theresa May, a dreary but diligent prime minister, couldn’t find those solutions over years, how likely is it they can be unearthed in days? Even insiders place the chances of a deal by the October deadline at 25 per cent.

The pragmatists’ preferred deal is to pass the withdrawal agreement, including a form of Northern Ireland-only backstop, with a whole muddle of untried ways to avoid a hard border and to prevent smuggling. The rest of the UK would leave the customs union and the single market, and negotiate with the EU for Canada-style free trade. This is a hard Brexit. The key problem, even supposing Europe were to bend its red lines by agreeing it, is that this too is unlikely to pass the Commons.
Lacking a majority, Johnson would need rebel Labour MPs behind him but they wouldn’t back a hard Brexit. Tory rebels would be torn; some would abstain. The DUP could balk at seeing its own red line trampled. Some ERG hardliners now oppose anything but no-deal. The risk Johnson runs in proposing a deal which might fail is both that he looks like a loser and that the purity of his message — I will deliver a good deal or no-deal — is lost.
Every option for Johnson now looks hazardous. Even supposing the public back him on either defiance or a deal, he can’t choose to go to the country; the power to decide that is now in Labour’s hands. Labour might choose, says one senior Tory, to keep him in office but not in power for weeks to come, dangling and looking weaker by the day.

The greatest criticism of him is said to be coming from the election strategist who won so many victories for the Tories and Johnson over the past decade. A furious Sir Lynton Crosby is reported to be “out of the game” after losing the fight with Cummings for strategic control.
Crosby thinks that mimicking the Brexit Party will prove a terrible error, damaging the brand and losing vital seats which won’t be compensated for by northern gains. But if Britain is still in the EU come November, he believes that the prime minister’s best hope is to avoid an election until Brexiteer anger dies down.

Whichever route Johnson chooses, this is now, as a former cabinet minister tells me, “a hell of a gamble” — with the party’s future, the country, our lives. But this is a trap he wilfully constructed. He has always thought details didn’t matter and that vim and vigour were the answer to any problems; tough reality may be about to find him out.
From the outside that all seems a very plausible assessment
If you have a problem with no viable solution it's going to be a headache. And the problem is skirted around and not faced.
The problem of course is unenviable options. The simple option which cures the headache is to remain in the EU so we can get back to being a normal, sensible nation again and cut out all this nonsense. Yes, a few elitists will throw a wobbly, some loony right wingers will hiss and spit, and some of the rest of the population will be peed off. C'est la vie.
 

Alistair20000

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From the outside that all seems a very plausible assessment
If you have a problem with no viable solution it's going to be a headache. And the problem is skirted around and not faced.
The problem of course is unenviable options. The simple option which cures the headache is to remain in the EU so we can get back to being a normal, sensible nation again and cut out all this nonsense. Yes, a few elitists will throw a wobbly, some loony right wingers will hiss and spit, and some of the rest of the population will be peed off. C'est la vie.
Your proposed solution is unlikely to upset the elitists as they will be delirious with joy if Brexit is halted. That is what they have been assiduously doing and plotting to do for the past 3+ years.

“Some” of the rest of the population will be peed off. How do you define “some” ? Would the pitifully small figure of 17.4 million fit ?
 

tavyred

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The simple option which cures the headache is to remain in the EU so we can get back to being a normal, sensible nation again and cut out all this nonsense.
The simple option is it? Deluded.
 

Mr Jinx

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Yep.
One poll this weekend showing a 15 point lead for the Tories. Clearly BJ’s ‘Parliament vs the People’ message has real resonance, not least because it’s true.
I don't think Boris even needs Farage now. Especially after Corbyn's interview on Marr this morning.
 

DB9

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From the outside that all seems a very plausible assessment
If you have a problem with no viable solution it's going to be a headache. And the problem is skirted around and not faced.
The problem of course is unenviable options. The simple option which cures the headache is to remain in the EU so we can get back to being a normal, sensible nation again and cut out all this nonsense. Yes, a few elitists will throw a wobbly, some loony right wingers will hiss and spit, and some of the rest of the population will be peed off. C'est la vie.
Mike, 17.4 million voted to leave, If like you say we just remain in the EU those 17.4m will not just accept it and go away, There would be so much more political upheavel that would make the last 3.5 years a teddy's bears picnic, All faith in politics would evaporate and that would open the door to even more extremes than we have now. People wouldn't be just peeved off they will be angry and i think more angry than the UK has seen in a long time, No much as I'm concerned about leaving and Brexit as a policy, Just ignoring it won't make it go away as Ms Swinson will find out on the doorstep at any future election
 
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IndoMike

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The simple option is it? Deluded.
Your BREXIT isn't working out too well though, is it? The Brexiters even forgot about Ireland. Not only deluded, but you must agree, pretty stupid too your BREXIT representatives.
 

arthur

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Your proposed solution is unlikely to upset the elitists as they will be delirious with joy if Brexit is halted. That is what they have been assiduously doing and plotting to do for the past 3+ years.

“Some” of the rest of the population will be peed off. How do you define “some” ? Would the pitifully small figure of 17.4 million fit ?
There are elitists and elitists. The right wing press barons, the hedge fund managers, rich and well connected Brexiter individuals (Banks, Rees Mogg, Cummings, Farage etc etc) constitute a powerful Brexit elite which has the money and influence to rival the traditional elite of which you speak.

And yes, people wil be upset if Brexit doesn't happen. And a large number of people will be upset if it does. It depends how the situation is handled.
 

IndoMike

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Mike, 17.4 million voted to leave, If like you say we just remain in the EU those 17.4m will not just accept it and go away, There would be so much more political upheavel that would make the last 3.5 years a teddy's bears picnic, All faith in politics would evaporate and that would open the door to even more extremes than we have now. People wouldn't be just peeved off they will be angry and i think more angry than the UK has seen in a long time, No much as I'm concerned about leaving and Brexit as a policy, Just ignoring it won't make it go away as Ms Swinson will find out on the doorstep at any future election
You think there's not gonna be upheaval with NO DEAL. No practical, social, political and economic upheaval?
You have to make your mind up, DHS. You want to remain or leave? I want to remain, with no messing. What do you want?
 

arthur

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As has been pointed out more than a few times on this thread Ireland is in the habit of holding more than one Euro referendum if the answer to the first one is not what was wanted/expected.

Can anyone explain to me how they manage to do this without it being termed a democratic outrage, a betrayal or spitting in the face of all those who voted No? Despite the reversal of referendum results the country appears reasonably at ease with itself
 
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