one out all out: a brexit from the modern world and every one of its problems please (we're all gonna die lol)

labour right would presumably kamikaze their careers (playing the "country before party" card in support of the may deal) before they let that happen

if the tory left don't kamikaze themselves by no confidencing TM first

I don't think anybody can tell whether a last gasp "May's deal rather than nothing" vote would even fuck individual MPs' careers, but I can still totally see not enough people blinking until it's too late

There will also be a drumbeat of "this is what the people voted for - this will be managed - don't listen to Project Fear II" - if this were picked up by a few newspapers it could do a lot of damage.

If I can just nick one of the paddle boats from East Park lake I can apply for new ferry service millions

I’d like to share one of my all-time favourite Chris Grayling anecdotes. Remember the Leadsom march in 2016 Tory leadership contest? A motley crew of slightly cringing MPs & cheery activists chanting: “What do we want? Leadsom for Leader! When do we want it? Now!” 1/2

— Pippa Crerar (@PippaCrerar) January 2, 2019

I'd forgotten he was the campaign manager - he'll do fine - we're all gonna die, though.

In other news, Sajid Javid is still a cunt.

He's that much of a confused racist/Uncle Tom, he'll end up deporting himself at some point.

labour right... (playing the "country before party" card in support of the may deal)

Unless I'm missing something this is May's calculation, no? That they'll be the ones to blink first. And is that such a misguided calculation?

Machiavelli winning out over Baldrick there.

I'm not saying they will! I'm saying if you had to bet on a particular group of people to blink, where would you look first?

surely all they need to fall in line is some bullshit that will sound reassuring to their constituents, which is what may failed to get when she went to europe. what i can't figure out is why europe didn't provide said bullshit.

Machiavelli winning out over Baldrick there.

Baldrick at the front, Machiavelli at the back

it will be interesting, after May's deal gets voted through, to see Labour become the Authentic Voice of the One True Brexit that has been betrayed!

We don't know that she isnt having people working on them in background. Seems more likely tho that she thinks they'll buckle eventually but is unable or unwilling to help it along

The conviction that what the world really needs from Britain is "leadership" - indulged by a govt that can barely tie its own shoelaces - is a fallacy with deep historical roots. It has bedevilled British foreign policy since 1945 - & its relations with the EU above all. [THREAD] pic.twitter.com/ioCW3plyNn

— Robert Saunders (@redhistorian) December 31, 2018

Oh and btw even if most of the labour right blink & vote for deal, I would still count on there being enough Tory hardliners to outweigh them.

May is a genuine conviction Tory is my best guess

if she was as vindictive and cold-blooded a politician as she is a person she might have been the shit hot operator she was briefly mistaken for in '16.

Racist in bad shoes is quite enough.

mate do you not remember when you got absolutely mugged off

Jeremy Corbyn in 2015: ‘Labour membership will determine policy, not me’. I’m looking forward to that promise being kept in 2019. https://t.co/kkG0G5iY0L

— Owen Smith (@OwenSmith_MP) January 2, 2019

some interesting pieces from during the holidays which you may not have otherwise read (if you know you were a normal person and enjoying getting tanked up on port instead):

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/31/path-second-referendum-labour-win-westminster-brexit-power

https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2019/01/brexit-in-defence-of-corbyn.html

https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2018/12/what-will-happen-if-labour-enable-brexit.html

That's a great thread gyac, thanks for that.

yeah i didn't read it last night, good stuff

Yes, good thread; helps me understand a little better the "psychological" roots of anti-EU sentiment in Britain, and the ridiculous rhetoric of Brexit:

" Yet this set an impossible standard for membership of a multinational community. The British refused to reimagine themselves as an equal partner - and in the imagination of the Brexit right, if Britain could not be a king, it must be a "vassal", a "prisoner" or a "colony"."

I haven't read it but, put it this way, I'm not in the least surprised Scotland had no problems with voting 62/38 to Remain.

https://www.facebook.com/155710354774360/posts/792749877737068/

lol we’re all gonna die

Let's just state this again. Seaborne Freight, the company given the contract to run ferry services from Ramsgate, post-Brexit, appears to have website terms and conditions copied from a fast food delivery site. pic.twitter.com/xY557Rqsgn

— Jon (@ormondroyd) January 2, 2019

Wow this is even easier than it looks. Let's start ILX Freight.

lol, every subsequent reveal about this "company" just get's better and better.

next it will come out the CEO is a flat earther and wanting some "fell off edge of world" accident cover.

lol flat earther would explain why they'd never had a ferry in the water before!

Can see pas de calais from Ramsgate on a clear day so flat earth beliefs shdn't be a problem

the dunking is fun (and there may well be lots that's dodgy or foolish still to emerge, since #failinggrayling) but not owning any ships is a red herring not a red flag: ferry companies routinely charter and it would be a genuinely weird and bad business decision to purchase any when ramsgate harbour is not even dredged fit for use yet, so they can just sit around to be pointed to

thread on background (contains faintly trolling pushback)*:

Not owning ships is not the super burn that everyone seems to think it is. Ships are chartered a lot. Even a little bit of Google research seems to show that the CEO of this thing is a ferry veteran and a bit of a local hero from Calais.

— Dan Davies (@dsquareddigest) January 3, 2019

*e.g. if it has to go to a UK firm for optics sake, better the decision points are the guy's actual professional background and knowledge (admittedly still to be confirmed), and not whether he has a spiffy website up and running months before it's needed (this is me slightly side-eyeing elliott higgins hurtling up to dox the guy's internet uselessness, in his usual to-a-hammer-everything-is-a-nail style)

aiui, they'll need to be operational for the end of March and the harbour won't have been fully dredged by that point - meaning they'll have to source ferries that can operate in shallow / narrow waters, which is much harder than regular ones.

The issue is more one for the government, though. Ramsgate doesn't have the customs processing capacity that Dover currently does and there's not much explanation of how, if Dover is overstretched administratively, rather than logistically, opening up a new port is actually going to help. It will in the long term, but it's harder to see it as a short-term fix. It seems to mostly be optics, though - which has obviously backfired.

very agree on that (and the bad website is also v bad optics of course, which grayling shd have had instant eyes on before rororoll-out)

they should crowd-source their ferry service - little ships, dunkirk spirit and all that.

to return somewhat invidiously to my hour of analytical triumph (=the baldrick/machiavelli thread and judgment), the hunch i was going on is that
1: logistics is difficult not easy! it involves many many moving parts, 9/10th of them entirely invisible to anyone not already involved in the process
2: a logistical set-up invented ex (more or less) nihil is 20 times harder, bcz many of the breakpoints and chokepoints will not be identified by cogitation in advance
3: the first decisions to emerge from the nexus needed will be very extremely scrutinised and will very likely not come up to snuff, however well planned
4: putting the decisions off reduces the scrutiny but greatly heightens the coming debacle
5: also it will NOT be well planned -- tories despise planning and have undermined the in-place system for same (=the civil service) ftb thinking ahead is a kind of disloyalty
6: all of TM's so-called qualities of firmness of purpose and alertness to the problems were formed negatively (i.e. they were hopeful guesswork based on the fact she hadn't actually made any moves yet and had stayed somewhat invisible to all but those on the end of her very bad decisions as HS
7: zugwang never sleeps baby
8: (as matt has repeatedly noted, all of this will also apply to the opposition if/when they take the reins -- with the added ferocity of active media assumption of utter incompetence from the outset, which TM had already earned imo but did not immediately receive)
9: lol we're all gonna die

The biggest bear trap in all this No Deal brinksmanship, which the government would be very wary of if they had any real political sense, is the question of what happens if and when people start panic-buying food. Images matter, the moment Labour were really fucked was the pictures of people queuing up outside Northern Rock, and if something similar happens here it's hard to see how the government can recover.

talking of which when exactly should we all start stockpiling MREs ?

asking for a friend

No doubt YouGov would be saying 40% of their survey have been loading transit vans with tinned tomatoes since the G Brown era.

if and when people start panic-buying food

Realistically, how is this going to manifest? What kinds of food? from where? The image of people queueing outside a bank is a bad look, but people queueing outside Asda? Maybe thats just roaring trade and a sign of blitz spirit and a healthy appetite!

It won't be queues, but images of empty shelves in asda telling the story. Because panic buying would be ppl filling hire-vans with dry goods and tins ptobs.

Lol i meant probably.

great news for the uk’s booming hire-van industry, a prime example of the kind of economic power post-brexit britain will wield

when we can no longer afford petrol we attach poles to them and carry them, sedan vans for the regency blitz spirit

Uber Alles

canned food already has use-by dates beyond brexit so you could already be stocking up on tins...

just gotta hope there'll be enough fuel to warm up that soup

Canned food has Best Before dates not Use By dates, pro tip for stockpilers