brexit negging when yr mandate is is trash: or further chronicles of a garbage-fire

the whole thing is such a clusterfuck of incompetence and mendacity that it’s hard to get straight what the hell theyre playing at.

what prevented Gove just saying “she was on holiday” rather than “we don’t know what she was doing out there, but if her husband says that’s what she was doing then we have to believe that’s what she was doing”?

Johnson has already given his weaselly and mealy-mouthed non-apology, so there’s no need to haver so pathetically, and of course the effect of doing so is to double down on Johnson’s original words.

it also leads to the further absurdity of Gove’s argument that we should be focusing on Iran’s desire to use “a democratically elected minister’s words” for “their own ends”. this is such palpably insane chop logic that it reflects very badly on Marr (yes i know) that he isn’t able to get any sort of hit on Gove.

using the principle of cui bono? doesn’t really get you much further than “boris johnson, sort of, certainly not gove” and certainly not Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. that is, unless you open up a mare’s nest of covert international agendas.

going back to johnson’s original words at the select committee is equally grotesque:

https://youtu.be/Vt1vIeriink

directly before saying he thinks she was working training journalists he stresses the importance of care in escalating these consular cases and avoiding a big public campaign is that it “strengthens the hand of people using these cases for their own ends”.

this disgusting and incompetently mannered man, with his imbecile habits of expression, should certainly go on any grounds - incompetence, mendacity or both - and so now should gove, though i’ve simply no idea what that pompous windy arsehole thinks he’s doing.

srsly gove’s look of smug self-satisfaction at his own cleverness when he’s just being a dim patsy is one of the most irritating sights in britain today. along with johnson’s hunched, defensive and deliberately unclear bluster.

Boris should not get sacked, he should be out there and get it sorted. Then get relieved of his position.

That's pretty naive, firstly it assumes he's capable of doing so without doing any more damage. Secondly it suggests that having exacerbated this situation (which I think is likely to have been through incompetence rather than mendacity) he isn't now trying to prolong it to turn it to his advantage (which is where the mendacity comes in).

He clearly knows that it's a lose-lose situation for May - if she sacks him she creates a Brexit martyr and the spark of a leadership challenge. But the longer she keeps him around the weaker she looks. If he does somehow manage to resolve the situation then he returns with his reputation enhanced even if he's taking credit for other people's diplomatic work - a near certainty in that scenario.

What Gove is playing at here is harder to work out. Apparently having decided that Boris would be a disastrous PM in 2016 he's now decided that's alright now? The most obvious interpretation is that he knows that Murdoch has tired of May and wants to replace her with what he sees as a genuine Brexiter. But that isn't Boris, who could end up being the useful idiot here, but who wins in the leadership clusterfuck is anyone's guess.

Meanwhile I keep imagining what it must be like being Richard Ratcliffe and knowing your wife is in an Iranian prison and your daughter is stuck out there and then turning on the news and seeing these two blundering around all over the place. Murderous rage wouldn't even begin to describe it.

What Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe must be going through is unimaginable. And I don't think there is any change that Johnson and Gove would be treating this all in such a cavalier manner if she had been a white British citizen. They'd be trumpeting the colossal diplomatic effort at every opportunity.

that last point has felt like the blaring subtext here right from the start

Well yeah the front pages of the Sun/Express/Mail would have been screaming for it for a year now. As it stands it has relatively little publicity until Boris waded in.

Has anything decent and authoritative been written on what Iran is looking to gain from this?

I don't think BJ could be trusted not to exacerbate the situation further at this point. Seeing as wherever he goes outside the UK, he consistently pisses lots of people off with his wilful rudeness and imperial arrogance. And if their state media were going to invent a crude caricature of "Western Imperial arrogance" it couldn't be any less like Boris, and he is incapable of acting any other way.

As to what Iran gets out of it... well, the uk is enough of a proxy for the usa, and has historically loomed large enough (Mossadegh coup for example) that there's propaganda value for Iran in clowning it- and as these dats it has no independent clout in the region, britain can be dunked on with impunity

this article, from feb 2016, a few months before zaghari-ratcliffe's arrest, about a different jailed BBC journalist, provides some good context

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/03/iran-former-bbc-journalist-arrested-foreign-minister-zarif-uk-visit

and this

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-41750919

Iranian hardliners think of Britain as “the old fox” – cunning and sly.

they must be getting some completely misleading reports from their MoI.

My Uncle Napoleon

Though the book and the TV series were briefly banned following the Islamic revolution of 1979 in Iran, it remained popular (Nafisi 2006) and is often regarded as "the most important and well-loved work of Iranian fiction since World War II" (Ryan 2006). It is noted for its lampooning of the widespread Iranian belief that the English are responsible for events that occur in Iran.

BBC News 24 has renamed the Brexit Minister Davis Davis, which I prefer.

Panto season officially afoot.

BREAKING Britain will leave the EU without a deal if MPs vote down final deal, David Davis said. MPs in the House of Commons audibly gasped.

— Christopher Hope 📝 (@christopherhope) November 13, 2017

blackmailing your own parliament, well played brexiters, well played

based on what I know about the implications of "no deal" this seems...quite bad?

nothing is bad, everything is permitted

so the choice is either the freefall nightmare of no deal, or accept whatever mess this bunch of incompetent clowns can bodge together in the next 16 months? nice fucking work guys

i'm finding the starkness of that choice actually quite terrifying to think about

A lot can happen in a week, never mind 16 months.

Things might even get worse.

Theresa May has launched her strongest attack on Russia yet, accusing Moscow of meddling in elections and carrying out cyber espionage.

Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson is due to visit Russia next month.

https://i.imgur.com/TI4TCvn.gif

Have we ever even checked Noel Edmonds position on brexit?

Trying to think of a swap shop gag but it's two in the morning.

Farage pushing Fidesz-style Soros conspiracies seems ominous

@Nigel_Farage
44m44 minutes ago

George Soros has spent billions in the EU to undermine the nation state. This is where the real international political collusion is.

this sounds like a right laugh:

The Commons public accounts committee published a report at 9am today saying that HM Revenue and Customs does not have proper funding yet to upgrade its customs systems in time for Brexit. It says that if the UK leaves the EU without proper customs infrastracture, the results will be “catastrophic”.

Here is an extract from its summary.

"Under current plans, the UK is set to leave the European single market and the customs union in March 2019. It would be catastrophic if HM Revenue & Customs’ new customs system, the customs declaration service, is not ready in time and if there is no viable fall-back option.

"In 2015, around 55 million customs declarations were made by 141,000 traders. The UK’s exit from the EU could see the number of customs declarations which HMRC must process each year increase five-fold to 255m. A failed customs system could therefore lead to huge disruption for businesses, with delays potentially causing massive queues at Dover and resulting in food being left to rot in trucks at the border."

Farage pushing Fidesz-style Soros conspiracies seems ominous

He has no fucking ideas at all. Imagine being this...unimaginative.

I can't imagine that.

Have we ever even checked Noel Edmonds position on brexit?

I could guess.

Is he going for deal or no deal?

Noel Edmonds was crankily tweeting "am I alone in thinking Britain is full?'" because he got caught in a traffic jam on the M1 or wherever. I think we can safely guess.

He also had that weird tv prog that was either about "rip-off Britain" or how sharia law was stealing the nuts from the bird-feeder at the bottom of his garden, his eyes are at least 80% swivel

Aye, he's made from Farage/Icke DNA. And he writes silly shit on his hands and has an imaginary id manifestation friend that follows him around.

he's the biggest cunt on god's earth, pretty sure he'll be a Brexiteer

can't be the biggest, he's only 5'6" or something

he packs a lot of cunt into that tiny frame

pretty sure he'll be a Brexiteer

I believe he fell out with Blobby over it.

I never did get to swap my Starbird for a nunchaku, the fucking tosser.

lol

https://media.giphy.com/media/HaCGRxArACAWQ/giphy.gif

lol never mind

BLOBY IS BALLS DEEP IN COLLUSION

Looking forward to a post brexit revival of swap shop as our economy turns to shit soup, cheggers doing the deals from the back of a truck full of rotting turnips stranded somewhere on the M20

two lols

hahaha

IT WAS A DEAL OR NO DEAL

oh forget it

we're going to be hearing a lot of that i reckon, best to get it out there

Farage: projection, as with all RWNJs citing Siri’s. Let’s not forget he’a a ‘person of interest’ in the US Election investigations.

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/f1/d7/ba/f1d7ba56ca3fa11bbd2ff74c0034e184--noel-edmonds-cosmos.jpg

l-r Michael Gove, Noel Edmonds, Boris Johnson

Frank Field is arguing in the House of Commons that we should leave the European Union on our time -ie midnight GMT not CET, one hour before

— Faisal Islam (@faisalislam) November 14, 2017

Top: Frank Field MP facing down interventions from Labour colleagues (2017)

Bottom: The Death of Caesar, Karl von Piloty (1865)

(h/t @DenisDoherty) pic.twitter.com/LbT0B69g9O

— Joey D'Urso (@josephmdurso) November 14, 2017