"oh you don't get me I'm the end of the union": lol brexit is how we're all gonna die

Considering

See?

10,000 gets a response from government, 100,000 get 'considered for debate', though that's a formality, I understand? And there's been other petitions to revoke before, so they may just say "we already looked at this"

“She didn’t even give clarity if she is organising a vote,” said one aide to a leader. “Asked three times what she would do if she lost the vote, she couldn’t say. It was awful. Dreadful. Evasive even by her standards.”

When leaders asked May what she was going to do if her deal was voted down, an official added that the prime minister replied that she was following her plan A of getting it through.

It was then that the EU decided that “she didn’t have a plan so they needed to come up with one for her”, the source added.

ouch

I can see her refusing to execute too. And then we are fucked, because by then it will be too late to forcibly remove and replace her before the deadline of April 11th.

We would be in the territory of an 11th hour order to revoke, which legal Twitter is fighting over the specifics of now but there seems to be a decent consensus that if parliament passed the order that would be good enough under the EU's requirements, even if May didn't actually sign a letter to that effect.

So much has to change when if we get out of this clusterfuck, and the FTPA has to be right up there.

Friday’s Daily TELEGRAPH: “Clock runs down on May as Tories tell her time’s up” #bbcpapers #tomorrowspaperstoday pic.twitter.com/cmjSnkbcbX

— Allie Hodgkins-Brown (@AllieHBNews) March 21, 2019

I would be very surprised if MPs aren’t plotting to get rid of her. That speech really pissed off a lot of them and a labour mp tweeted that he was threatened in person today.

They need to start doing so basically tomorrow or Monday latest if so, and I don't think we are there yet

That was a much better QT than usual, by which I mean that it was possible to watch it without getting totally mortified and changing the channel.

have replaced it by being mortified by Tracer's post there.

what was that from, Tracer?

The Guardian liveblog is where I saw it.

thanks.

Sorry, stet, I forgot you answered my question yesterday:

The route to May getting forced out is for her to lose two no-confidence votes (eg she can no longer command majority). If there's time before the 14 mandated days elapse the Tories could hustle another leader in and get them to pass a no-conf and then the government can continue.

I thought she (or her government) only had to lose one to trigger the 14 days? Either way, she will still be the leader of the Conservative Party - if they form a government, she will be the PM, as I understand it.

Or, if they can't/are out of time then it's automatically an election. May in theory can lead for that if she desires, but this is when the Men in Grey Suits point out that they won't fund a campaign with her leading and she has to resign. Surely.

I have to ask - are you still that sure of it today, though?

Constituency with the lowest % of voting for that petition is (from what I can tell) Walsall North, whatever that means. Large swathes of the West Midlands seem to be pretty chill with whatever's coming our way

Yes, if she loses one VONC then the 14 days begin. To prevent a dissolution and automatic election, any party has to win a VOC. As the Tories can't eject May, she can insist she gets to try and win that vote, probably repeatedly on current form. That's why they have to lose *twice* to be rid of May, or I guess at least to force the election.

I am pretty sure she won't be allowed to lead that election, although one anon minister was quoted tonight saying May suggests she would fight any election before 2022. We're further into Trump-land with May than I ever thought possible, and there's no norm she won't break.

And this is all academic given that none of that has time to play out before April 11, which is when we have to vote for holding an EU election. The types who count the votes say there is no chance of this parliament having a majority to hold an EU election, much less a second ref.

So the options are pretty much:
1. Pass the deal,
2. MPs take control of timetable, pass something -- most likely winner of indicative vote now seems to be a Corbyn-backed CU 2.0 negotiating mandate,
3. 11th hour revoke on April 11 or
4. No deal on April 12.

No matter what variation of 2 there is, the route to delivering it is unclear. May might go willingly, she might be pushed or she might block it (in which case the actual constitutional crisis begins). But regardless, if they don't vote for EU elections by April 11, the most we could negotiate would be an extension until June 30th to get whatever it was we wanted in 2 done, on pain of a (extremely difficult to delay) No Deal to follow. This is v. high stakes now.

This is totally normal behaviour from a Prime Minister

So in @faisalislam's report just now, Vince Cable claimed that Theresa May in her meeting with opposition leaders said that "the people voted for pain" when asked about the damage No Deal might wreak.

— Alexander Clarkson (@APHClarkson) March 21, 2019

The papers are talking about another vote on May's deal next week, but I thought Bercow had ruled that out. Can anyone explain this?

it now says "April 12" so it's a completely different document.

yeah it feels like MPs need to move quick on her now... but I don’t think they will until wk3 of this extension.

brextension

This is so tediously going to the 11th hour as well

Been wondering how this might have panned out had Andrea Leadsom become PM instead, back in the heady days of '16. Probably best not to go there.

Falage: it doesn't matter what the attendance of his brexit march will be, it's the symbolism of it and 20 million ppl will be there in spirit. But no doubt at first hint of slightly inclement conditions it'll be a couple of hundred fools minus him.

Stet - yeah that makes sense - I should say that I hadn't thought about the idea that the party would refuse to fund an election with her in charge, though it's a bit of a Cleavon Little move. But I agree that it's the best chance.

(So this is cavilling but) As I understand it, what you need for an election is one VOC and 14 days - if there's no votes in that period, still an election - if there's 14 votes and she loses them all, still an election.

Which seems like pretty sociopathic behaviour, but then:

One aide is quoted as saying:

She didn’t even give clarity if she is organising a vote. Asked three times what she would do if she lost the vote, she couldn’t say. It was awful. Dreadful. Evasive even by her standards.

When leaders asked May what she was going to do if her deal was voted down, an official added that the prime minister replied that she was following her ‘Plan A’ of getting it through.

It was then the EU decided that “she didn’t have a plan so they needed to come up with one for her”, the source added.

calzino - it's already minus him, he fucked off after the first day!

Yeah I realised that later - one vote will do it, so long as she is able to somehow run out the clock. But in practice there would be multiple votes as people tried to take control.

This is why the FTPA is such a bloody stupid and dangerous piece of legislation. It has to go.

i thought NF was talking about another yet another march. he was plugging his new "moderate" brexit party. maybe he just keeps turning up at brexit marches on the off chance that one of them will be a real biggie.

He's sitting in a cosy studio at Sky News with Adam Boulton at this very moment.

if “parliament takes control” can they actually pass any legislation off the back of an indicative vote?

xp Oh maybe - his 'historic' two-week thing from Sunderland is still on and still due to get in on the hopefully non-historic Mar 29.

The brain trust at conhome are suggesting that the ERG should call a vote of no confidence right now, because no-one will notice that if an SI reflecting the deal yesterday isn't passed, the UK leaves on the 29th.

The discussion within the EU was apparently genuinely rather heated rather than the usual rubberstamp, and overran dinner. From Politico:

And while Britain’s future was being decided: The prime minister was sitting helplessly upstairs in a windowless room, waiting to hear what was agreed. Tusk did nip out half way through to keep her updated, but otherwise May simply had to sit it out. The Sun’s Tom Newton Dunn reports that leaders did at least send up the three-course dinner she was missing — green lentil terrine with langoustine, followed by roast duckling à l’orange with parsnip mousseline — on a silver platter. Sadly her aides had to make do with takeaway pizza as they watched the drama unfold on Twitter.

legally there are 14 days between a VONC and a potential election, realistically the clamour for an election may be so loud (and the political momentum only going in one direction) following a VONC it would presumably get called earlier

brutal thread

1. Last night, I was invited to be on the BBC show ‘This Week’. I thought that Davos was a bewildering experience, but this beat everything.

— Rutger Bregman (@rcbregman) March 22, 2019

lol owned

According to Reuters, Emmanuel Macron, the French president, told fellow EU leaders during the EU27 discussion (ie, after Theresa May had left the room) that he thought May had only a 10% chance of winning the vote next week before he arrived at the summit. After hearing her address the meeting, he was revising that down to 5%, he said.

Donald Tusk, the European commission president, said Macron was being “very optimistic”, Reuters says.

Oh yeah and the leader of the Brexit Party quit yesterday because of retweeting 'white genocide' messages.

I think it was Tom Ewing who said that Farage had sitcom-protagonist level bad luck - he just wants a patriotic anti-EU party, and everywhere he turns - racists!

xxxp yeah you only need 2/3 support for a "let's have an election" - but parliament has to be dissolved 25 working days before the election.

xps im sure thats all true but.... salty enough cos it wasnt an advert for his book, sounds a lil naive

Time was a producer would read your book in the street.

time was your book wouldn't arrive to coincide with *falters, gestures, weeps*

It's less about not having advertised the book and more about not having bothered to engage with his ideas, it shows up the hollowness of the festishisation of "debate" in this country - the marketplace of ideas appears to extend to inviting Nazis on TV and nothing else.

yes rutger bregman needs the impressions and sales that a fawning appearance on this week would afford

Anyway I'm pretty sure he went on This Week largely so he could have a viral Twitter thread about how stupid it was.

the Beeb has a whole 24 hour news channel where you'd think there might be space for more long-form thoughtful discussion, but everything seems to work to the same format: every interview is a confrontation, every talking point has to be snappy, yes/no, let's get to the "truth" in 3 minutes so that our viewers don't get all confused or succumb to the thought that some issues might be complicated.

you pretty much get what you deserve if you decide to engage with this cobblers but

May would definitely have beaten Leadsom but it would have been better for the whole country if there had been more Tory MPs in the race and not just barging each other off the track. Feel like allowing May to become MP unopposed deprived the Tories of a proper debate about the kind of Brexit they wanted, and it deprived the public of the opportunity to see that debate and understand it for themselves.

Instead, May was allowed to bluster and shapeshift for years and we can see how well that's turned out.

If Leadsom hadn't pulled out, May would have actually had to campaign for the job, and we all know what a wonderful campaigner is. Mind you, with Leadsom as PM, we probably would have had a no-deal brexit six months ago and we'd all be on our last can of stockpiled baked beans

third meaningful vote confirmed for next week

what could possibly go wrong

xp(s) At the time I was delighted that Johnson & Gove stabbed each other in the back and neither of them ran, but it might even be that they'd have been a little more moderate with the red lines.

Then again, they might not have been. Too hard to predict such self-serving wildcards. I reserve the right to be very annoyed with whatever they do in the next leadership race.

A debate among Tory candidates (or, better still, some kind of cross-party exercise and/or public consultation) would've been very good, yes, if there was any way it could have been a real debate and not just a competition for who could bellow loudest while saying least. Maybe there were a few weeks of opportunity before we entered the bellowing and flags stage.

Am I meant to have stockpiled six months of beans? Oh. Oh dear. Hope the neighbours feel generous.

Oh no, you went on This Week and they didn't talk about your boring book, well boo bloody hoo. So selfish. Perhaps you'd like to make way for someone who actually respects current affairs. A person who will go on TV and will be happy to speak about literally, absolutely anything.

— Simon Hedges (@Orwell_Fan) March 22, 2019

No doubt someone will screenshot this with the caption "having a normal one ", well I am having a normal one actually. I'm one of the few people having a normal one left.

— Simon Hedges (@Orwell_Fan) March 22, 2019

Anyway I'm pretty sure he went on This Week largely so he could have a viral Twitter thread about how stupid it was.

― Matt DC, Friday, March 22, 2019 11:30 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think this is both a) completely true and b) good for him.

Maybe a good idea if you're invited on a tv show to have some sort of idea about the nature of the show? He's not Bobby Gillespie after all. Or is he?

we are all, in a very real sense, bobby gillespie

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D2NtMvBX0AAVnxJ.jpg

In defence of him he's not a Brit, I wouldn't expect a British writer shilling a book in Germany to have detailed knowledge of the content of German political shows. Main point he's making is how shallow and disengaged the British media is compared to other countries, so maybe expected a higher level of engagement based on his experience elsewhere.