by Arneb » Sun Oct 20, 2019 12:59 pm
Maybe I should be more specific.
It is a good thing because
1, BoJo and his crowd have lied to the country, to Europe and to their colleagues so often, so relentlessly, so consistently, so ruthlessly and so without any hindrance by fact, standards of political reliability or by simple human decency that the more shit flies intio their face, the more kicks in the nuts they get, the better.
2, the facts of paragraph 1 being well-known, the House of Commons closed a loophole into no-deal Brexit land that MPs had every reason to believe BoJo would take: Have them accept the deal, then either slam past them a Brexit law full of deliberate unclarities, loopholes and inconsistencies (because it has to be through in two weeks) or grind the legislative process to a halt altogether and achieve no-deal through the backdoor. Letwin and his colleagues saw that and prevented it in the last moment. I wouldn't generalise to what Ian Blackford said, that you couldn't ever trust any Conservative - but I would certainly say you can't ever trust Boris Johnson and the ERG lot.
3, I may seem old-fashioned here, but three months might actually be better for the actual Brexit law than half a month. Laws made in a hurry are certainly keeping lawyers alive all over the planet (no disrespect to Heid and Richard_A), but they are rarely a good legislative solution to an actual problem.
There is one aspect in the law which I am not sure I find good: That the law allows for more time to legislate a referendum or to stop Brexit altogether. The UK has spent a lot of political capital in Europe, and doing a 180 on Brexit now, after it has paralyzed the Union for more than three years, might completely eradicate what is left of it. There is a lot of of "OK, if you really must go, go. But let's get it over with now. NOW, please" sentiment in the EU, and I admit I share it to a degree. Stop Brexit now and you'll have JRM twanging his way through Parliament for the next 30 years telling everyone how the will of the people was betrayed and the Sun braying on about how every pothole in the country roads (and there are many) is Junckers', Merkel's and the bloody Eu foreigners' fault because they are bleeding us of all the money our hard-working taxpayers earned and which we could use ourselves etc. Maybe Britain really has to go through this in order to see what it's gonna be missing. And maybe it will need the Scottish people to say we'd rather be with the Europeans than with you to make even has-been Imperialists and Little Englanders see they miss a lot just standing on the sidelines.
Maybe Brexit should happen now and we should go from there. The EU will always allow for Bre-entry.
Non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem