Brexit and logistics

to be fair, most people were influenced by Murdoch and the idiot Farrish (who I've always assumed was a "useful idiot" for the Kremlin)

Not really about logistics, although a bit in passing but....

An article in the times about the "Festival of Brexit", sorry "Unboxed", event and its total lack of value for money/impact. An interesting note from the report is that a third of its "audience" (those that "engaged" with it) are counted from the regular viewers that watched a clip of some part of it on Countryfile.    Some selected lines:

"The Commons DCMS select committee requested a National Audit Office (NAO) investigation into the festival with the Conservative MP Julian Knight, who was then the committee’s chairman, describing the it last month as a “monumental cock-up of gargantuan proportions”.


"The unofficial “Festival of Brexit” name deterred some of the country’s largest cultural organisations from taking part. " Colour me surprised. 

but the real treat lay in the online reader comments: 

"It was a splendid idea. We burned effigies of Polish plumbers, French food importers, remainers and experts. Hundreds of trucks staged a park-up with a large sign saying “Dover 25mi”, whole families partook in a form-filling bonanza in multicoloured triplicates, had their fingerprints taken, and crayons were distributed for the kids and the kippers. There were concrete obstacle courses, a bus with imaginary numbers for the mathematically illiterate, another one with simplistic slogans for the economically illiterate, a giant sinkhole marked “Benefits Thereof” into which Jacob Rees-Mogg urged happy revellers to throw their common sense and their bank notes, and as a fitting finale, a tombola was organised where one lucky winner collected an Austin Allegro Sovereign, and the runner up got two of those.


Epic, it was."

Acknowledgments: Raja Charles

An interesting one this week - chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2023/01/untying-brexits-toxic-knots.html

I personally think that the Lib Dems vow "that we will cancel BREXIT" in 2019 was in part a reason for them losing seats, to take such an anti democratic standpoint cost them dearly.

but then I think Parliament as a whole is anti democratic, what percentage of the UK population would support the reintroduction of capital punishment for the worst cases of murder etc.

I don't expect a referendum for at least 20 years. If one was held tomorrow I'd doubt that I'd vote to apply for membership: the UK had a pretty privileged position within the EU having managed to get various exemptions/rebates and goodness knows what over the years. If membership of the Euro remained a condition of accession to the EU, then I doubt you'd get a majority even if as now (it would seem) a majority say that leaving was a mistake. 

For the future health and wealth of this country, our relationship with the EU - both in trading and political terms - needs to move something far healthier and productive than where we are now. That can only happen if the failures and shortcomings of our current post Brexit arrangements are recognised and acknowledged. If the primary proponents of Brexit remain in power, then they also need to 'own' those problems and graft to fix them: you can't fix what you don't recognise is broke. The country cannot afford for those people to be holding the levers of power while continuing to live in the la la promised land of post Brexit sunlit uplands. 

You may see the repeating of the narrative of post brexit failures as 'crying after the milk has been spilt'. I see it as trying to continually highlight aspects that are causing significant damage to the country in the hope that it will promote action to fix them, and make it more politically acceptable to fix them (which will undoubtedly entail crossing some of the ERGs red lines).

Three years after leaving, and we're still having to explain these most basic things... Do you really think Brexit was ever some kind of simply black-white, in-out thing?

The vote was. That was most of the problem.
"Remain" had an obvious shape. Continue as we were, a core member of the planet's most successful supranational body.
But there was simply no hint as to what "leave" would look like. Anybody with any clue knew that there were SO MANY OPTIONS, right from the hardest of the hard to the softest of the soft.

Before the vote, even people like Farage and Hannan were unequivocal that we should stay within the single market and customs union.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4y6BVPNe50

As soon as the vote was done, May ruled that out in a single "red line" in a party conference speech - No ECJ.
The ECJ is the arbitrator for every single European supranational body. No ECJ meant no role for the UK in any of them.
That one throwaway meant that nothing but a very, very hard leave was possible - and that's what we've got. The only harder option would have been to have no trade deal with the EU at all.

Then she started the two-year clock before negotiations had even started.

Do you know what the only difference is between "May's deal", which was so toxic to Johnson that he resigned as Foreign Minister, so toxic to the ERG that they voted their own party down in the largest government defeat ever, delaying their beloved exit by nine months, and Johnson's "oven ready deal"? The NI Protocol. Yes, the one that is now apparently so abysmal and destructive. The only other option was to break the Good Friday Agreement, which the US made VERY clear was not an option.

What's the NI Protocol do?
It keeps NI in the single market and customs union...

There has to be a border somewhere between inside and outside the single market and customs union, right? And the Republic of Ireland is inside.
So if GB is outside, then is that border down the Irish Sea, between GB and NI (Protocol), or a land border between NI and RoI (breaks GFA's requirement for borderless island)?
May's backstop was to keep GB inside the customs union in the short term, breaking her own red line, buying time to figure a long-term option.



Let's not forget that's the same man who is now on course to repeal massive swathes of legislation, rolling back half a century of environmental and employment protection amongst many other things - with no replacement for it - simply on the grounds of it having been decided together with the neighbours instead of on our own...

bills.parliament.uk/bills/3340

...with a large element of "We warned you this would happen..."