Brexit Delay

[Arneb]

OK, so I have a good reason to be depressed. Gee, whoever said that voting in a democracy made no difference? Fuck it does.

[Lianachan]

I saw on twitter that one MP said “I hope she collects air miles, because she’ll not come back with anything else”.

[Arneb]

And very few to boot, going only between Lunnin innit and Frittes City.

[Richard A]

Heid the Ba, sadly, has it right. The point is that too few of them get that the EU is not going to be strong-armed into agreeing to making compromises it already made clear it can't agree to. Labour, though, is continuing to push for a permanent customs union - and might just get that as more and more people understand that a) that can be achieved and b) May's unicorns can't. But we'll see.

[Arneb]

It just occurred to me that that the "alternative" in the backstop-"alternative measures" is very much in line with the recent use of "alternative" as in "alternative facts". Unicorns exist, if you believe in them strongly enough, you know. Until they don't.

[Richard A]

But another problem is that the hard Brexiteers simply do not get why what they think is just a breed of horse is in fact a unicorn. Something that Arneb and I have often talked about is that he finds it special just driving into Berlin from the surrounding countryside. I imagine Boris saying, "What's the big deal? I don't even know where the boundary between London and Buckinghamshire is - on many roads there aren't even signs. So your wife takes the kids from Potsdam to school in Zehlendorf - and?" He would even say, "You believe in all this European cooperation but you say that a German university opening a campus in Wroclaw and flying a large German flag from the main building wouldn't be a good idea. Why not - you believe in academic cooperation, don't you? And when I went to Berlin when I was Foreign Secretary, I saw loads of cars with Polish number plates. What's the problem?" Some of them do get it but don't care - on a level with, "Arneb, OK, I know you grew up with a wall around West Berlin. But you and your family had a pretty good life then, didn't you?"

For May, though, it is a unicorn exactly as Arneb describes. I think she does get what the big deal is about the Irish border - I don't think she believes, as Boris et al do, that Brussels is just being difficult for the sake of it. But she does cling to the belief that she can please her right wing and get a deal with Brussels. She can't. She can, with a customs union for the whole UK, have a deal that will get a Parliamentary majority and be acceptable to Brussels (and preserve the Good Friday agreement - or rather because it preserves it). But that would mean telling her right wing to go screw themselves and she doesn't have the bottle to do that.