Seizing back control: The ILX lol brexit is how we're all gonna die thread.

I don't even care if it is a made up tabloid story, for all the vile troglodytes it winds up it'll do for me.

Every now and then the prison-industrial complex accidentally metes out justice.

And yeah, I want to believe.

If the gossip in the papers today is accurate, the ‘woman to get one of the big four jobs’ is Patel at the Home Office, rather than Truss at no.11. That’s terrifying.

Michael ‘the Good Friday Agreement was a mortal stain’ Gove heading for Northern Ireland.

AS minisite seems like a good step: https://labour.org.uk/no-place-for-antisemitism

(xp) I'm sure I saw a headline today about Boris not being one to hold grudges - and also that he might be putting Gove in NI. Does not compute.

“Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer”

lol you do know that the person who said this was a FICTIONAL MAFIA BOSS and that the other pithy thing he said (not abt family) was "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in"

who do you think the "they" refers to in the second quote?

The DUP?

Michael Corleone:I saw a strange thing today. A rebel was being arrested by the military police. And rather than be taken alive he exploded a grenade he had hidden in his jacket.He killed himself and took a captain of the command with him. Now, soldiers are paid to fight; the rebels aren't
Hyman Roth: What does that tell you?
Michael Corleone: They could win

Sil does a very funny ham reading of that line in The Sorpranos. And then some people out there make daft gangster quote memes attributing that line to his character. Just saying!

I really hope that gossip is wrong because Patel at the Home Office and Gove at Northern Ireland would be two of the most disastrous decisions Johnson could make, as bad or worse than some of the appointments May made at the start of her Premiership.

Thinking back to the other day's discussion about leadership, and the extent to which the personality and judgement of the incoming PM matters, the decisions that will be announced over the next week or so are one reason why it does, no matter how much we might want it to be otherwise.

Caveat - the media is disproportionately focused on vacuous Westminster theatre at the expense of what happens at local/street level, which is one reason why they got the 2017 election badly wrong. Leaders in general gain their authority or lack of it from movements and wider social or historical forces, and Johnson is being propelled to Number 10 by forces that are fucking deranged and detached from reality and would probably have put someone like him in power regardless. The forces opposed to him are one reason why he probably won't stay there for very long.

Quite possibly we would have ended up with Brexit anyway eventually, but ultimately we're in this very particular situation now because of bad decisions made by a handful of stupid, hubristic or complacent individuals, and what Johnson himself chooses to do from here on matters. The only hope is that his government is highly unlikely to last very long and is probably going to be too repellent to enough of the electorate to prevent it winning a majority.

Michael ‘the Good Friday Agreement was a mortal stain’ Gove heading for Northern Ireland.

oh god, I thought you were joking.

I have a PDF of his anti-GFA tract somewhere. I didn't make it very far through it tbh but my eyebrows were raised even through the preamble.

that was a good post btw Matt, thanks

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/20/britain-lured-into-deadly-trap-on-iran-by-trump-hawk-john-bolton

If correct, this should surprise nobody.

it all sounds so very predictable and plausible.

is bernal in the thomas group?

uhhhh.... wrong thread

Don't Say You Love The Anime If You Haven't Read The Manga 💅 pic.twitter.com/zImEbLND6b

— jewdⒶs // יידהודה (@jewdas) July 21, 2019

"Thinking back to the other day's discussion about leadership, and the extent to which the personality and judgement of the incoming PM matters, the decisions that will be announced over the next week or so are one reason why it does, no matter how much we might want it to be otherwise."

As you say he might be in for a short term. How is Gove in NI worse than a minister who said they had no clue about the politics over there? This isn't about wishing it otherwise.

You could argue Hunt's ability to concentrate on the task at hand could be worse too.

they could literally put a sandbag in a orange high-vis in Brady's place and it would make little to no difference.

not true

it would be a noticeable improvement

Sandbag in a high-res vest >>>>>> some clueless Tory dumped in at last minute >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> a guy who wrote a 58-page document criticising the Good Friday agreement, compared it to the appeasement of the Nazis and claimed that the dilution of British military presence was "the real cause of conflict in Northern Ireland".

Even if he sat at his desk and did absolutely nothing the decision alone would be deliberately inflammatory at a time when the Irish border is the big obstacle for Brexiters.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/20/britain-lured-into-deadly-trap-on-iran-by-trump-hawk-john-bolton

If correct, this should surprise nobody.

― ShariVari, Sunday, 21 July 2019 13:43 (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Completely agree. With these incidents 'cui bono' is always the best principle one which to be working, and it only leads you to the conclusions of that piece.

Re: NI. Gove would need to be motivated to do something that counts. Otherwise that's all huffing and puffing.

Over the last few years we've seen a lot of destructive, inflammatory rhetoric. Priti Patel talked about food shortages in Ireland. We've yet to see anything.

Sure he is motivated but I doubt he knows what to do to bring a hard Brexit that brings no chaos to NI or the Tories.

There's not much point arguing about it until it happens but, at best, it would be a 'fuck you' signal not just to Northern Ireland but also to the EU.

I think he might have a bigger job lined up for Gove in any case.

Isn’t Priti Patel the one who got sacked for freestyling Israel policy?

I mean he's given enough fuck you signals as it is but hey.

gauke and hammond announce they will quit if boris becomes PM

uhhhhhh guys you’re getting fired anyway

This is like when shit footballers retire from the national team

So apparently the journalist who leaked the Darroch memo was a 19-year old who "decided to look into the impartiality of the civil service".

We were all at it at 19 I suppose.

lol at the age of 19 I was very concerned about the impartiality of the civil service myself, when i could be bothered enough to take a break from imbibing vast quantities of class a's and completely losing the plot.

Back in the old days you had to go to Cambridge to get a russian handler. This is the meritocracy in action.

ah those good old days when a Toynbee would hang out with and get shitfaced with a tankie-spy rather than writing backbiting screeds about them in the Graun!

The Patel / Gove rumour makes some sense if you assume that Boris's main motivation is Nixonian paranoia - Gove would struggle to excel as minister for Northern Ireland considering the fucking it's about to receive, and Boris would reckon (probably correctly) that a brown woman would be safe in one of the great offices without posing a threat to be the next leader.

But this probably says as much about projection by the source of the leak as anything else - over the weekend the Times, the Telegraph, the Independent and the Mail (and probably others) had collections of exclusive leaks about the future cabinet, any two of which are contradictory.

Now Steven Edginton, a young journalist and digital strategist for Nigel Farage's Brexit Party, has claimed to be responsible for obtaining the papers.

Despite his association with anti-EU politics, he says leaking the cables was not a "Brexiteer plot to topple Sir Kim" - but insists he did it only to "develop my career" as a journalist.

Mr Edginton, who has worked as a freelance journalist as well as a strategist for the Taxpayers' Alliance and Leave Means Leave campaign, said: "The leak of Sir Kim's cables had absolutely nothing to do with the Brexit Party."

I mean obviously I'm against the security services torturing journalists to reveal sources in general..

He's been around for a 19 year old.

I forgot to mention his time as a video journalist for Aaron Banks' website Westmonster.

He's done a lot of terrible things for one so young.

These kind of vat-bred nazikinder are never "young" tbf

and Boris would reckon (probably correctly) that a brown woman would be safe in one of the great offices without posing a threat to be the next leader.

I mean, just to be clear, 'safe' there is again purely from a Paranoid Boris point of view, Patel is an absolute headcase who at one point wanted to bring back hanging.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EAB2oVuXUAAmMEP.jpg

some lordly polling from that twat of The Verve's dad. Some Labour Remain voters apparently don't harbour unconditionally hatred for the LibDems and fucking Jo Swinson and feel slightly only slightly more positive about the Labour Party than they do about Nicola Sturgeon!

idk, there's a clear winner at least ;)

yeah the brexit party!

I bet if you googled "irish journalist on brexit" you'd have got a whole page of Tony Connelly until this last week. We are now truly in the Fintan O'Toole age.

Nobody really knows anything about Jo Swinson so I'm not sure how much stock I'd put in that. Most respondents probably don't even realise she was a junior member of the coalition. Including Clegg in the poll would have been interesting.

The Green response is better than the Brexit Party's because its less polarised, partly because they aren't really a threat to anyone and only headbangers want to look like they don't give a shit about the environment.

The other big take home from that poll is that Labour Leave voters on the whole don't feel positively about anyone. You'd think there'd be an opportunity there for someone but hard to find where it would fit in our current political system.

There's not much point arguing about it until it happens

lol we've been doing that for a few weeks now you know.

The point I was making -- that the fate of NI is indepedent of whoever is minister for it -- is not provable but I suppose until he is confirmed it remains to be seen how he will be able to push for the dissolution of the Good Friday Agreement, or seek to undermine it, in ways other than pushing for Hard Brexit, which the rest of a Boris cabinet would be doing anyway.

Ultimately what I've been saying...of which this is but the latest iteration on: Hunt PM/Brexiteer-remain mix in cabinet pushing for Brexit to go through is not that different from Boris PM/Hard Brexit cabinet loudly pushing for deal or no deal by 31st October. It might look better (or less grotesque) if Hunt were in charge but I doubt it will make any difference if the medicine you need isn't available in the counter next week, or for the fate of NI/Ireland border.

Even Raab/Patel/Unchained lot has been on cards for a while...the question is how long can it last when the thing they are pushing for would make it incredibly difficult to carry out post-hard Brexit shock. Especially when the people involved don't look like they have a detailed plan besides a desire for an outcome.

xp
If there was a snap election it's practically guaranteed the bbc will find and interview shitloads of northern 2017 Labour Leave voters who despise Corbyn and are perfectly amicable with Mr Farage and very positive about his party, because we just want them to get on with it .... etc

They did so during the last election, even if the eventual result wasn't quite what they'd been hoping and working for.

My main takeaway from that poll: the rich don't know how to spend the money they have stolen from us.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/opinion/boris-johnson-prime-minister-britain.html?smid=tw-nytopinion&smtyp=cur

Don't think this is v good (and I really like James Butler).