I’m not sure they’ve thought the Scottish version through.
I’m struggling to think of what to say about the events of the past week that hasn’t been better said already. Johnson and his fellow dicks at Number 10 are following a Crash Through or Crash strategy which in practice will be Crash and Crash, one where we’ll all end up in the pile-up.
Suspending Parliament, denying the realities of No Deal while warning everyone to Get Ready, threatening MPs with deselection if they vote to protect people’s livelihood and lives, preparing to blame the EU for the failure of negotiations while doing absolutely nothing to advance them: these are the actions of a wanton narcissist angling for a snap election under a broken electoral system that represents his best chance at consolidating power. I have no idea whether he’ll succeed at his goal of becoming Robert Mugabe, but it looks odds-on that he’ll deliver us some of Mugabe’s greatest hits.
I’ve lived in four democratic countries, and two of them are now on life support. Last Wednesday I felt for the first time as if I was living in something other than a representative democracy: something darker, meaner and bleaker. Social media is full of Leavers crowing that Johnson is about to “deliver democracy” as if a vote is an Amazon order, but democracy is a process, not a Jim Davidson DVD, and you don’t deliver it by shutting the process down. They complain that MPs have ignored their vote, when MPs and the rest of us have done nothing except think and talk about it for three entire years. They want to get on with it, to get it over with, when the last thing a No-Deal Brexit represents is a chance to get back to normal.
My brother-in-law was staying with us last week, so I didn’t have a chance to get to any protests, but now that he’s flown back to sanity I’ll be taking every opportunity to put on my EU T-shirt and hit the streets. St Giles at 2pm on Saturday 21 September, for starters.
Fortunately, I can rely on my local MP to do the right thing, as he’s one of the few who ignored Jeremy Corbyn’s instructions to support the triggering of Article 50 in the first place. When history is written, he’ll be on the right side of it.
Boris Johnson’s calculated disregard for parliamentary democracy. The length of prorogation matters. This is no longer about Brexit: it’s about democracy itself. Britain has failed. Brexit has failed, but the Brexiters have already won. What Dominic Cummings could be thinking he’s up to. “We can see Boris Johnson is playing a game but we don’t understand the rules or the strategy.”
Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings have united Remainers. The fight is now against something even more horrifying than Brexit. How we got here.
A staggering tweet from DExEU Secretary Steve Barclay, on a par with Dominic Raab’s comments about Dover. John Bird and John Fortune nailed Brexiters twenty years before the referendum.
Ivan Rogers on the realities of a no-deal Brexit.
Shoppers in Ireland face empty shelves within days of No Deal. What did the Irish do to deserve any of this, apart from choose a location next to an island full of delusional imperialists when they were migrating across Europe at the end of the last Ice Age?