Illuminati-R-Us

Is the government an Acme product?

No, it's far less dependable.

Indeed, love it! Though we are now in the strange position of Theresa May finally giving a detailed account of what she actually proposes, only to find that the hard Brexiteers don't like it, the Remainers and soft Brexiteers don't like it and very likely the EU will reject it. The White Paper is a masterful attempt to have her cake and eat it - the amended version even more so. A 2nd referendum is looking increasingly likely - for the very reason that Justine Greening gives: the likelihood of Parliament agreeing to any given option is close to nil and only a 2nd referendum will clear the logjam.

I can't see any way forward that doesn't involve a second referendum since currently no-one is getting what they want.

They can't even agree on what the want to ask for. Fucking idiots. All they think seems to matter is that then can agree on what to ask for, with no consideration of the fact that it then has to be negotiated with the EU. And it's only taken them TWO FUCKING YEARS to get to this stage.

Tory fuckery in the voting. Short version, if someone from one party would have difficulty making it to parliament to vote there is a long standing agreement that the other side will ensure one of theirs abstains. It allows for the ill, those with family emergencies etc. to not have to travel to London. The Tories agrred to several of these for the Brexit vote then tried to pressure their MPs into voting anyway.

Heid the Ba wrote:Tory fuckery in the voting. Short version, if someone from one party would have difficulty making it to parliament to vote there is a long standing agreement that the other side will ensure one of theirs abstains. It allows for the ill, those with family emergencies etc. to not have to travel to London. The Tories agrred to several of these for the Brexit vote then tried to pressure their MPs into voting anyway.

And some their MPs did, "accidentally", vote anyway.

Lianachan wrote:And some their MPs did, "accidentally", vote anyway.

It wasn't Sod Off Baldrick, was it?

Nobody with anything as high as Sod Off Baldrick's levels of intelligence and integrity.

When the best (only) line a Prime Minister has to keep her party in line is to say, "If you don't, I'll call an election" - with the clear implication that she expects to lose if she does - you have to wonder, don't you! And we have as a Foreign Secretary someone whose key credentials are provoking the first major strike by doctors in 70 years. At least he's no longer in a position to cause more damage to the NHS.

But hey, it could be worse! At least our judges are still required to have legal qualifications and Theresa May doesn't get to appoint our university managers.

They do her bidding just the same, don't they?

Btw, great you're around again. I hope you'll forgive my frequent snipes at the English football team....

Yes, when Jeremy HUnt is your last, best, hope then we may well befucked.

Arneb, the university managers or the judges? lol Well, she hasn't had the easiest run in front of the latter - she was far from happy about the decision that it''s Parliament, not her, that gets to decide whether Article 50 gets triggered and, as a former Home Secretary, I can't imagine she's happy about the Cliff Richard decision. As for the former, well, it depends on the university. Some have taken a public stand. But all too many of them are indeed doing what they're told - and any brake on that has been largely as a result of social media campaigns.

Saw a bit of Stewart Lee at the weekend, and he was pointing out that it's not fair to characterise leave voters. It wasn't just racists that voted leave, he said, it was cunts as well.

Stewart Lee is a wise man.

Also: Jeremy Hunt managed to forget what nationality his wife is today. I know they all look alike to Tories but it is bad form to describe your Chinese wife as Japanese.

To be fair to Mr Hunt, it's an easy mistake to make. I often accidentally refer to my wife as "Japanese", and she's from Stornoway.

Heid the Ba wrote:Stewart Lee is a wise man.

Indeed.

Stewart Lee wrote:We only wanted bendy bananas, now we're lost in this chaotic inferno of hate.

A stark reminder of why the importance of the EU standing firm with Dublin is about more than simply the European project. (And no, I haven't let the Daily Mail persuade me against the idea of the European project - it's just that the Irish border is about even more than that.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cZe2ihEZO8

That is succinct yet beautiful. Whenever I get hung up about some idiot in our government I can always, thinkung of the UK, give a sigh of releief that it could be so much worse.

Indeed it (the German government) could be a lot worse! Come to that, I'm not sure you have any idiots in your government - the idiots in Germany seem to be outside it. Though the recent posts in "On this day in history" remind us of the importance that an effort be made to see that they stay there. A reminder on this page: the path to Brexit (not the idiotic debates, but the path to the actual implementation of Brexit) began when David Cameron started to panic about the rise of UKIP and then continued when we failed to take the Leave campaign sufficiently seriously. Now we have an even worse prospect than Brexit - a new UKIP leadership that welcomes Tommy Robinson and has called for the introduction of special prisons just for Muslims. "Ah, but it won't come to anything!" Except that some of us remember Hungary being, at least in the 1980s, the reasonable face of Communism and then the first to take its fence down - did we think that those nice kids would grow up to vote in Viktor Orban? Let us hope that once March has come and gone and the EU has taught Britain once and for all that European values matter, it will turn its attention more fully to Hungary and Poland. At least the British Conservative MEPs won't be there to come to Orban's defence in future.

Once no deal catastrophic Brexit happens and there’s a hard border in Ireland, can we call it the Norn Iron Curtain?

For not acknowledging this before, but bravo.