“I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow the house down” - Doris’ all wind and piss…
See Jane’s post as well as my own
The text of the bill is now available and confirms that the UK government intends to try to unilaterally re-write parts of the commitments already made in the WA
So much for oven ready.
Basically Tories supported it because they were promised it could be changed later - it is worrying that those in power have so little idea about legally binding agreements.
One can only assume they consider others as duplicitous as themselves.
Or as stupid, I’m not sure which (both probably).
I think the commentary that it won’t pass through the Lords is probably correct - in spite of him recently filling it with cronies… then Doris will blame them (as well as the EU)…
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That’s the only bar - but how does this play out?
Johnson setting up “Remainer Lords” as a new target of blame for failure to secure the mythical “beurre et argent de beurre” deal? But to what end - he already has the EU to blame.
Lords reform?
The latter seems unlikely as a reformed upper house might actually have teeth which is hardly what the government wants (though arguably it is what the country needs).
It has already been pointed out that “No Deal” is good for Johnson, if a disaster for the country - if he gets a deal it’s on him if there is any downside (which is inevitable), if he fails to get a deal he can deflect blame to the EU.
The danger I see is that reasonable people (such as yourselves) understand this very extreme right-wing government’s actions as indeed extreme, but still within the rational framework of ‘normal’ politics, and of some kind of brexit strategy.
But there are at least two more obvious contexts for the catalogue of law-breaking:
- Fascism - deliberate breaking of some laws alongside more draconian enforcement of other laws being a recurring pattern;
- ‘Gun-boat diplomacy’ - similar to 1, but harking back in typical brexiter fashion to the heyday of the British Empire’s disregard of standards of law or ethics.
Certainly, it would be naive to assume - in view of ‘Britannia Unchained’ and previous statements of both Cummings and Gove - and Johnson being little more than a front man - that brexit is the end-game, rather than one stage in a much more radical disintegration of ‘liberal’ institutions in the UK.
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Sadly I think Geoff is correct - certainly this reasonable(?) person has recognised for some time that the government’s behaviour and attacks on our institutions go well beyond normal behaviour, even for politicians.
The problem is that there is bugger all I can do about it.
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How strange that recently we have had to come to rely on an un-elected House to uphold our Democracy and the illegal gambits of this government.
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None of us can Paul - except by making the little contributions to collective actions I’m sure most of us already are - expressing our views/fears when we can, boycotting the right-wing-press, supporting opposition politicians, etc…
They want to test the entire UK population every week?
It is simply a distraction from the current testing fiasco, dont fall for it.
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yup…
“On the basis of what is presented here, this looks less like Apollo 11, which took Neil Armstrong to the moon successfully, and more like Apollo 13.”
and thus more “dead on a beach, than dead in a ditch” 
Be careful with comparison to Apollo 13. It is known as the successful failure, and in a lot of ways was the most triumphant of the Apollo program. They just didn’t manage to land on the moon
Yup - had Johnson been in charge he would have listened to the experts, ignored them and sent an instruction to the crew which caused the whole capsule to explode - then somehow claimed it was a roaring success.
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We are doing our bit & will never set foot in a Wetherspoons again nor buy a Dyson or a JCB.
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Me too, though I doubt I would ever need to buy a JCB, I decided Dysons were overpriced rubbish years ago and Wetherspoons has merely changed from “a pub chain I don’t frequent, because there isn’t one near me” to “a pub chain I will never go into unless on the verge of death by dehydration and/or starvation and there is no other option” - which is not that much of an additional boycott in practice.
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I believe they sell soft drinks?
Though I’d probably stick with asking for tap water as they are obliged to give you that for free.
EDIT:
That’s sort-of an odd thing to say as it is the alcohol which causes the hangover, so to say “alcohol makes hangovers worse” is a tautology.