So on Tuesday we will learn whether the USA is going to take the UK's crown as having the World's Most Stupid Electorate. Predictions are apparently quite close, with
fivethirtyeight.com putting the odds around 2:1 at the time of writing. Colorado is a particularly close state, not that you'd know it from Boulder of course. I ran past a Trump poster on Sunday, and someone in the group I was with mentioned it was only the second one they had seen.
Apart from that, we've got the unedifying and dangerous spectacle of those who called for the sovereignty of British Parliament, now denouncing this sovereignty as anti-democratic - and worse, labelling judges who upheld it with the chilling Nazi-era “Enemies of the people” slogan.
Great to see the Telegraph get in on the act too, patriotic poppy and all. And rather than supporting the independence of the judiciary, the govt response was to issue mealy-mouthed evasions about the importance of a free press. So much for the so-called Party of Law and Order.
It's blatantly obvious that the reason May doesn't want to reveal her cunning plan to parliament is that there is no plan. What is more puzzling is how those who are supposed to be among the brightest and best minds in the country haven't yet worked out the problem, which is quite simply that there is no “good brexit”; there is no sensible way though the process of cutting ourselves off from our largest trading partners and source of much-needed labour. Yet the Three Brexiteers are still blethering on with their idiot fantasies about how we can pick and choose exactly what we want from the EU27, and they will just roll over and accept it. Economics isn't everything and no doubt there are quite a number of xenophobes who would think a recession is a price well worth paying to reduce the number of young europeans coming here, studying in our universities and/or working and paying taxes. What's more troublesome from my own point of view is the growth of anti-rational populism fed by deliberately malicious and dishonest politicians and the media.
Of course the question is not even whether brexit is a good idea or not. Brexit isn't an idea at all, it's an incoherent mishmash of contradictory ideas, connected only in that they involve some change from the status quo. The vote for brexit is the logical equivalent of voting to go out for dinner - we might all agree that my cooking isn't great but if one person thinks they've been promised a curry, another is wanting to go to a French restaurant and a third is expecting fish and chips - and all have been promised that it will be completely free, in fact they'll be paid to eat it - then there is likely to be disappointment and disagreement as a result. As the chant goes: “What do we want? Well if you didn't know why did you vote leave?” At least, that's how it should go.
Jules says (quite rightly) that I shouldn't just criticise without coming up with a solution. What would I do? Well, nothing has change my previous opinion that the only reasonable solution is to abandon the process. This will take a lot of backtracking now that May has backed herself into a corner so firmly, but the reality of the situation is that there is no plausible brexit that will actually satisfy the British public, and all options for change are substantially worse than the status quo in basically all aspects. Will this actually happen? I don't know, the
betting odds give about 70% probability to article 50 being invoked next year, 30% probability to 2018 or later or not at all.
Still, at least we can all rely on the BBC to do its patriotic duty and bend over backwards when some reactionary bigot demands that they play the national anthem at every opportunity:
