Wings Over Scotland

Perfect. Throw thier deceitfulness in their faces for all to see. Great start to the day.

Let’s all forget about Leonard – in fact, all of them. It’s the early days of a better nation after all.

Who is this ‘Leonard’ who’s name keeps popping up?

Spot on , once again, Chris.

Well done Chris, that sums it up perfectly. What an absolutely unprincipled, useless crew. Yuk.

Hehehe, Delightfully true. Their pathetic each and everyone of them. My Saturday has now commenced . Thanks CC .

Well done Chris, shows this lot for exactly what they are. Totally unprincipled and useless. Yuk.

Brilliant Chris.
Nice One.
As said many times before, the SNP could find the cure for all the worlds ills, and this sorry lot would still vote against them, and I mean VOTE AGAINST THEM, they are and always will be that pathetic, self interests over the country/people who vote for them, its that plain to see.

“Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them…well I have others.”

? Groucho Marx

Medieval minded England still imagine that they are world leaders and anything other is Johnny Foreigner the enemy. Theresa’s rant yesterday is exactly the mindset of most Englishmen who still believe that they are welcomed and loved the world over.

England is on the road to becoming a fascist state. UKIP will rise again if the Tories falter. Already we can see Mr Javid doing a UTurn on the Windrush children,whilst May has been funnelled down a track by DUP and hard line Tories, which will inevitably leave us isolated in the world, because we lose our European status.

Please do not even try to tell me that immigration is not behind all of this mess.

The UK hates foreigners, especially those we have conquered in the past who have dark skin. They are meant to be servile rather than part of Society. They carry the blame for every Ill in society. The scapegoat.

Chris, your toon is fabulous. Every one of them a hypocrite and accomplished liar and deceiver without a shred of embarrassment..

Scotland has the chance of a different path and I hope we take it, because I do not wish to live in a Country the like of which we will inevitably become should we fail to gain independence.

Excellent, Chris.

What an absolute state these idiots are.

That’s McDonnell in The Guardian, this morning, saying there would be Brexit under Labour, but they would secure better terms from EU.

Sick of telling the blinded Corbynistas, Labour support Brexit.

It’s important Labour supporting Scots start to face that reality. Labour are anti EU.

Chris, you’ve hit the bulls-eye!

In my opinion if the British Labour party swapped to being pro-EU (that is what anti-brexit really is) they would be slaughter in an election as the media and British Conservatives would go full on ‘Rule Britania’, ‘How we won the war’, ‘Dunkirk’,’Battle of Britain MkII’. The voters in England would lap it up.

In Scotland British Labour would gain no ground as we already have a pro-EU party in the SNP.

The support for stopping Brexit in England may be vocal but I think there has been too much anti-EU stuff and guff that is now embedded in a lot of the electorate’s minds to allow a pro-EU party there to win.

As with every opinion I have had, I could be proved wrong.

Illogical and contradictory. The two basic characteristics of British Nationalism.

For Scotland, the biggest example of this is the way Westminster has virtually the same list of reasons for the UK leaving the EU as Scotland has for leaving the Union, but are then treated oppositely. OK for England’s independence, not OK for Scotland’s independence.

But England’s reasons for leaving the EU is VALIDATION of Scotland’s reasons for leaving the Union since they are the same.
England is therefore caught in the trap of reason from which there is no escape.
And so the BritNats resort to propaganda and the now familiar sequence of lies, distortion, blame and deliberate confusion.

Illogical and contradic-tory.

Well done, Chris. You are a gem.

TM aint no MT.

Anent the absence of small Dick Leonard from Chris’s excellent cartoon.

You do not attack the poor, helpless monkey – you go for the organ grinder who is making all the grinding, pointless, noises off.

Leonards nothing but a puppet and torys and lib dems leaderless smegheads right now vince is stepping down if he’s not done so already and mays just basically walking to her own political execution so no wonder it shows Corbyn Davidson and rennie they the only ones who still stick to being the hypocrites they really are.

ot/
so shereen announces on the BBC that the well known commentator Martin Geissler is to lead on the new bbc news channel for Scotland.
Ok another No to self determination place man. No change there. If he is working for the BBC and we have Alison Rowat pro uk unionist and ? Hannah McGill.

As an aside – since the tories and liebour work together over the class testing and want to remove it from P1’s. Speaking to folk who like the idea that their child is assessed earlier than later please John Swinney give parental choice. Let the individual parents opt in or opt out. Most will ask I think to opt in. let the tories say that’s not allowed.

In a normal country these clowns would not get a free ride, Scots live in a country trying to become a normal country, deafeating these clowns is on the road map to Scotland becoming a normal country.

THERESA MAY- BREXIT – LEAVE – THE DUP – DARK Money – £435,000

A REMINDER

link to opendemocracy.net

“Of course, in the middle of all this was the snap general election which nearly broke Theresa May, leaving her dependent on votes of DUP MPs. It led hundreds of people to contribute cash to our investigation, without which we’d not have been able to do this. And it left the UK government in a tortured position: reliant for its majority on a potent mix of a Northern Irish party that’s been crippled by a string of financial scandals and on the radical right of its own party, desperately pushing their own vision of Brexit.

But here’s the thing. In the middle of all of this, there are people who know where the DUP’s £435,000 came from, and why someone worked so hard to keep it secret. And some of those people might very well understand why transparency matters in politics, why citizens have a right to know who is trying to influence us. If you are one of those people, you can slip us whatever information you have here.

We’ve been running this investigation for a year now, with a growing team of colleagues and helpful contacts. And what we’ve discovered is perhaps not surprising. While the Brexit vote was fuelled by legitimate rage, it was steered by rich and powerful men (and yes, mostly men) who work very hard to keep their interests hidden.

Which means we have to keep working hard to expose them. Starting with the cash which paid for that placard I happened upon in Edinburgh.

Donate to our investigation here, and we’ll keep digging.”

The memory of Michael Portillo, former Tory Cabinet Minister, on The Daily Politics came to mind this morning for no apparent reason. He said that the Government knows how to fix the result of a referendum. But no one paid much attention.

I suspect that this is a tactic to cause confusion and division. Keeping there own supporters ignorant and giving ammunition to the yes movement makes it appear that it is Yes that is being pugnacious.

HYUFD – an interesting train of thought, even though it entails the EU interfering directly in UK ‘democracy’ which is beyond even thinking about.

What would have countered ‘The VOW’ in September 2014, would have been the promise of an increase in State Pension by the SNP to, say, parity with Ireland (50% increase). Some would say that alone would have lifted the 45% Yes vote. It certainly looked like the SNP missed an open goal with Pensions in IndyRef14.

It remains to be seen if the SNP make the same massive mistake again in the next independence Referendum. To repeat the error would be unforgiveable should NextIndy be lost.

Driving back from the shops there and puts car radio on and Shereen Nanjiani’s shortbread programme bursts into life on P1 testing.

(not a fan of stale news and raking over the coals & SNP bad but)

Anyhoo! I was about to put on the CD but low and behold all the pundits were basically in approval and thought politicising the issue was not good (they never outwardly said Tories bad but, you know) and further more gave Mr Swinnie a nod of approval not to back down.

FGS! Had to pinch myself…Jings!

Excellent Chris.

To these jumped up self congratulating, over paid, jobsworths, the people, including children in Scotland, are collateral.

Their aim is to demonise the SNP, our democratically elected party in government, and to ensure they do their masters’ job in orchestrating as much damage as possible. Their London masters give the orders, these lickspittles do the donkey work.

They are an insult to Scotland, they work against Scotland and actively damage Scotland. It’s a disgrace.

I don’t know how they sleep at night, they must have to check their fat bank balances before bed, to deal with it all.

Love the Corbyn one. It nails how I feel about the guy. I just don’t know what he really thinks.

Ruth on the other hand only has one thought … SNPbad.

Willie? Willie may have had a thought once … it is difficult to tell.

When you boil it down, Labour, Conservatives and LibDems have no real interest in Holyrood, presumably that’s why their MSP’s are so woeful and see it merely as a staging post to jump to the big smoke of parliaments. It irritates them they don’t have Holyrood, but it’s not the big prize for them.

They SNP have upset their apple cart, it threatens their little club of joining in with the big boys (just a saying as some are women) in London. Any unionist politician would throw Scotland to the wind to increase their own profile at Westminster, we just need to look at Brexit to confirm this.

If they were acting in Scotland’s interest, those so called Scottish politicians would be backing Scotland’s place in the EU we voted for. Unless deep down they believe that Scotland is the only country in the world that could not run its own affairs, not sure which of these makes me despise them most.

Of course some of them don’t actually believe Scotland is a country but a region, at least I suppose their position is consistent. They are not pretending to be Scotland’s champion but Westminster’s representatives in Scotland (basically the colonial type).

Here’s the thing.

The only, apocryphal (?), reason I’ve heard for dropping assessments of P1 is children being upset by it. Not being a father I’ve no direct experience of being a parent but giving in to them every time they throw a tantrum seems a great way of making a rod for your own back.

Thisisnt

re;Daisy Walker@12.03

O/T
Great comment there Daisy. Labour are there to give the illusion of a democratic system in their so called UK.

There’s a very good book, ‘Living off the state, a critical guide to royal finance’, by Jon Temple, Progress books, 2008.
Tip of the iceberg, you won’t find the book anywhere though.

The demonisation of Corbyn has all been a front, a very convenient distraction from the British Nationalists catastrophic and impending Brexit.

People who are Labour supporters won’t hear a word against Corbyn, they have no hope otherwise.

Just to mention, my family were just over from Australia, have toured around most of England this time, and said everyone they spoke to said they voted remain. They are wondering, ‘ who the heck voted leave, or are people too scared to admit it?’

TheBichanLagos You are forgetting the main dispute with Mauritius is over the Chagos Islands as the US has an airbase it wants to keep there which the UK backs and Mauritius opposes. Of course the most powerful superpower in the world since the end of the British Empire has been the USA and Trump of course backed Brexit too

Manandboy Possibly but do not forget The Republic of Ireland overall now spends less as a percentage of GDP than the UK and had to impose heavy austerity after the 2008 crash to get its finances back in order

Artyhetty says:
22 September, 2018 at 12:40 pm

thanks, looks interesting

link to amazon.co.uk

Manandboy:

Much as I would personally like a 50% pension increase, any promises on such a scale would have been laughed out of court in 2014 as unaffordable. Whether true or not MSM and Bittertogether would have had a field day.

I am desperate for Indy, at 71 I can’t promise to be around in 20 odd years or so. Please though, no uncosted unaffordable promises about pensions or anything else. I would take Indy even if it meant a small decrease. At least I wouldn’t need to keep fighting the wallet moths for fundraisers!

For the record, Norway is one of the richest countries on earth, in spite of the fact that Norway, unlike Scotland, has none or little of the following :-
* Oil & gas in the Atlantic Margins
* Extensive wind, wave and tidal green energy assets.
* Major agriculture and fishing industries
* Whisky & Gin industry
* English speaking
* Trading neighbour of 50 million (albeit from hell)
* Banking and Finance
* Computing
* Electronics and construction
* Tourism, textiles & transport
* And more..

An independent Scotland will be far, far wealthier than any part of the continent of Europe with the possible exception of Switzerland.
To deny this is to engage in May-speak ie. lies, distortion, blame and a stubborn denial of obvious factual truth.

Hail Alba

What about “Scottish” Labour; don’t they have an opinion on these important issues? (rhetorical question)

More nails in the coffin of the money myths we’ve been spun.

link to whatifitoldyouthis.blogspot.com

Found it in a comment under a Chris Hedges talk in August 2018, which is excellent as usual and, although describing US policy is equally applicable to our own sorry oligarch devastated culture.

His advice is to take to the streets. Edinburgh October 6th?

link to youtube.com

The last thing the DUP would want is a GE, unless it can once again produce a number that gives there 10 MP’s the same power. If not then there is probably going to be a border in the Irish Sea, it would be sort of fitting. I expect Stormont would suddenly become a necessity to be back up and running with such a scenario.

If there is a snap election Scots need to send a clear message to Westminster, anything else will be used as weakness. It would look like an election is possibly going to happen before an indyref, unless May clings on, she is currently playing up to her right wing to retain the job. We need to get the Indy vote out at the next GE, this time it must be top of the agenda, along with retaining SM & CU access.

Saw some claiming online to feel sorry for her, not me, she is a myopic autocrat to my mind. All the signs were there since she was home secretary, power crazed and will sacrifice anyone to maintain her position.

Terrific cartoon Mr Cairns. If I had to choose one of them to receive a custard pie in the face, it would have to be Wee Wullie.

The so called democrat who says if it was up to him the SNP would not be allowed to take part in debates

link to youtube.com

Morning links on the previous thread for anyone interested.

Great cartoon Chris – could be called Hypocrisy rules!

I heard Nigel can’t remember 2nd name MP from the DUP who leads the party at WM talking on the radio last night.

He was supporting T May – of course, but I wish he could have heard himself

”so long as she doesn’t let the EU bully her and dictate where the border should be between North and South Ireland …..’ We of course, would never support a border in the North Sea and we must no remain in the Single market or Customs union and we have told her that’… In other words, we have bullied her and we are dictating where the border is to be.

The DUP is running the UK and Brexit just now.

I noticed Farage is worried that UKIP is moving too far to the right – must be bad then!

T May can’t call a GE just now because her Tank Commander in North Britainland is about to go into labour any week now and won’t be able to fight her corner with a baby on her hip – and Treeza needs those 13 Scottish tractors to keep her majority…

She’s definitely backed herself into a corner on this one.

gus1940 says:

front pages are a classic example of today’s propaganda

Indeed. Saw the display at the supermarket today and it’s like there is a parallel universe out there.

May had a chance to allow a fudged version of Chequers to be the basis of the non binding statement accompanying the Withdrawal Agreement. The EU threw her a lifeline. All she had to do was accept the backstop arrangements for Northern Ireland.

She screwed up by telling them she hadn’t done anything constructive about Ireland. So the lifeline was yanked away tout de suite.

Then she makes a defiant fight-them-on-the-beaches speech when she returned home. And the media focus on that and run with the fallacy that May is acting rationally.

Talk of a general election. It could come about in various ways, but just imagine it’s been called.

What manifesto are Tories and Labour going to run on regarding Brexit? Both seem clear they will continue with the madness.

The sensible answer would be a Brexit which appeals to their core voters and then attracts some others. However, with polls suggesting most people now want Remain, making a proposal to Leave isn’t going to attract these folks!

The Tories cannot possibly continue May’s line of Chequers or No Deal, can they? That now amounts to saying NoDeal!

Surely no one could stand on a ticket of NoDeal?

Labour. They could offer an EURef2, but with what options? They would first need to get agreement with the EU on Canada+backstop or Norway, then present that as a choice against Remain.

FPTP means either only needs over about 40% to form a government. Either could manage that. The problem would be one winning without improved clarity on what happens next. Which could happen.

@Nana 3.32 thank for all the great work you do.

So Willie Winkie thinks half of Scots should have no democratic input into debates.

How very wholesome of him, and to think his merry band have a whole 5 out of 159 MSPs

Dr Jim Most Protestants in Ulster and DUP voters have Scottish Presbyterian ancestry

“Eeny, meeny, miny, moe….”

Polls show even in England Remain would win a second EU referendum if there was No Deal and No Deal would also not get through Parliament most likely without a second referendum.

Therefore most likely it will be a stay in the SM and CU transition but Chequers will be dumped with a Canada style deal the basis for FTA talks in the transition period

link to theguardian.com

When you read this, you’ll realise that you’re not what you think you are – a voter, an observer, law-abiding, a consumer, an informed intelligent citizen.
You’re not even a spectator, or at least not at where the real game is being played. No, the truth is, you’re not even in the stadium, where the game of Dark Money is underway.

If you want to understand what Theresa May and her associates, both inside the Conservative and DUP Unionist Party, as well as elsewhere, are trying to achieve with Brexit, then you have to consider what is happening here and elsewhere, under cover of darkness, meaning in total secrecy.

Like the £435,000 given to the DUP to promote leaving the EU, of which, amazingly, not a penny was spent in Northern Ireland and which, when ‘investigated’ by the Electoral Commission, was deemed to be outside the scope of their authority.
But this is small beer.

And if you think that Scottish Independence is our business as the people of Scotland, then you may have to think again. During the years before we started to wake up politically here in Scotland, and learned about the dirty tricks played on us by successive Tory and Labour Governments, others, both here and abroad, had already been busy making plans for Scotlands emerging riches.

And still are.

frogesque says:
“Much as I would personally like a 50% pension increase, any promises on such a scale would have been laughed out of court in 2014 as unaffordable. Whether true or not MSM and Bitter together would have had a field day.”

While I see where you’re coming from, Frogesque, I take the view that for the oil economy of an Independent Scotland to be unable to afford to pay pensions at the level of Ireland, currently, 243 Euros/£218 a week, is laughable.
UK pension is £125.95 as of 11 April 2018

Just by off-loading Scotland’s share of Trident, by itself, would be more than sufficient. The idea that a country which is as rich as Norway couldn’t match the pensions of Ireland is a joke.

Better Together 2 would have to think very carefully indeed before labelling Irish-level pensions in Scotland as unaffordable. How would that make the mighty Empire of England with the lowest pensions in Europe look? Ha!

If anyone is interested in a Dutch newspaper’s (Volkskrant) view of the Salzburg meeting,I translated an article.

The most amazing quote was:
“Did those present know what it feels like to have your country divided up, she asked her table companions. The Irish Prime Minister, the Cypriot, the Czech, the Slovakian and Chancellor Merkel all bit their tongues to avoid bursting into laughter. They all have personal experience with it, Merkel was born in the East Germany GDR.”

link to m.facebook.com

LOL apologies…’Principles’ 😀 😀

Abulhaq Is England proposing to reestablish the British Empire? No. If it was really proposing to be imperialist it would try and challenge Germany for leadership of the EU superstate

How things change, a soft Brexit now would be described as Chequers or essentailly any deal at all, whereas hard Brexit has come to mean No Deal. This wasn’t always the case and it’s easy to forget that things were very different even just two weeks after the EU referendum.

This was how soft and hard were being defined by one presenter on the BBC in July 2016.

link to archive.fo

The UK public have been led up the garden path over Brexit, totally manipulated into giving the corrupt leaders, those that you never see, exactly what they want.

Meg merrilees @ 15:58,
Dr Jim @ 16:36,

Remember in the last-but-one UKGE where the Tories (and their willing little helpers in the media) were monstering Ed Miliband with the “tail wagging the dog” jibe over the SNP (then as now the third-largest party in WM)?

After May’s “strong and stable” =cough= gamble, the Tories are now being pushed around by that tiny band of NI antediluvians (nth largest party in WM) and the only thing that May can say about that is that we must humbly respect and satisfy their every whim.

They and their media pals have no shame.

I was a union representative for more than 25 years (on and off, because it’s not something you can do properly without it burning you out).
One thing I learned in all those years was this.
The arseholes who run things don’t know what they are doing.
They react…..they take orders….they have never had an original thought in their lives.
Order takers….and May is just another one.

Just going to keep posting this for anyone who hasn’t watched yet:

The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire

link to youtube.com

HYUFD AT 6.36

The UK basic state pension now is £125.95 per week. The basic Irish state pension to anyone 66 or over is E243.30 ie £219.04. Fact.

The price of Brent crude, or Scottish oil has reached $80 dollars a barrel.
Something to gladden the hearts of unionists.

The day after the PM is told her plan doesn’t work, and is still the same as the one they previously told her didn’t work, because it would compromise the single market. The UK government and press respond with, to paraphrase, ‘You foreign bastards better start showing us some respect’.

Exposed, the so called superiority of British diplomacy. It’s about as sophisticated as a Neighbours script, also a Neighbours script is probably less transparent than the direction the government, but the gullible seem to be lapping it up.

Farage is back, with sidekicks Davis & Hoey. It’s a spewghetti western, A fistful of dollars remake.

@K1
Notice how the Scroatfud got his sectarianism in, it’s Murdo Fraser it’s defo Murdo Fraser lookin up his wee SIU book for things tae say

Macart
You don’t appear to be an English cultural chauvinist, so you’ll always struggle to get your head around this. It’s largely a colonial legacy thing. As a Scots, you have to be a hard-core yoon to view the world from the imperialist’s perspective.

New British exceptionalism – no longer in competition for the best and the brightest?
link to blogs.lse.ac.uk

Elite discourse and popular opinion on European union. british exceptionalism revisited
link to cairn.info

‘Brexit’ in transnational perspective: an analysis of newspapers in France, Germany and the Netherlands
link to link.springer.com

Today’s Daily Express headline is a classic – even by the hilarious standards of that joke publication.

“May’s greatest hour”

Is Murdo one of the “Boll o Meal Frasers?” I wonder. A past Lord Lovat doled out meal to anybody taking the Fraser name to boost his rent-roll. It’s in the genes, a grasping sod!

@CameronB Brodie

Heh! Safe to say I’m not an English cultural chauvinist right enough.

Three good choices there Cameron and I’d recommend No.2 as well worth a read.

Prompted by another great cartoon from Chris, here’s another wee thought for the mix. If a UKGE does indeed come along in the next few months, and Corby somehow (how?) manages to scrape enough MPs to claim first dibs at power, but not enough to win a majority even with the help of the ever-eager LibDems, so he has to depend on SNP support to get anything through the HoC, how likely would he be willing to offer us an IR2 any time soon? Given that a likely indy win would deprive him of his own lifeline in the HoC…

The SNP may be his insurance policy for another indecisive UK result, but his only likely payout for a claim would be stringing the SNP along on false promises that never amount to anything, like back in 1978-79, I reckon.

Liz g @ 20:45,

The EU’s attitude to the UK state is not conditioned by the latter being a member. As a matter of diplomatic niceties, it will continue to treat the UK post-Brexit as a unitary whole. It cannot be seen to interfere in internal UK affairs, as the whole world will still see it.

The only time we’ll be recognised as sovereign and thus can be formally approached in our own right is after a duly-recognised democratic vote.

About a minute after such a vote, actually. The time it takes to dial-up Edinburgh and say “congrats, let’s meet”.

(Which is something that the legalistic nit-pickers still don’t seem to understand. Sovereign power is everything. All else is mere detail.)

Aye Dr Jim, noted. Stirring little shitbag.

Robert J Sutherland @ 10.33
Yes Robert J,I do understand and agree with you,about the EU having a protocol around not interfering.
But they will have their ways too.
What I am floating is the idea that all those trips to Europe were not for nothing,and I’m mindful of Nicola’s welcome in Ireland where she was asked directly “what can we do to help”!
In short we don’t have the information that Nicola has and she seems to have very much taken the temperature in Europe.
While she was doing it the British Nationalists were just a tad unhappy about it too!!
So if we are to wait till after Brexit day to actually hold the referendum,I would be presuming that Nicola would have judged it ( for whatever reasons) to be the best thing in the round.
And I’m just, as I said, exploring what those reasons “might possibly ” be!
Absent an obvious tipping point that would justify calling on Nicola going ahead full tilt,we have no other choice?
All we can really do at the moment is work on that tipping point.

All accross England today there have been rallies and meetings attended by Brexiters such as David Davis Nigel Farage (he’s got another bus) and others riling up the English folk to get behind a Leave means Leave campaign

So I say once again England is deciding the fate of Scotland Wales and Northern Ireland without giving one jot of thought to the way anybody elses voted because those people in that country believe that they and they alone are the United Kingdom or Britain and England and the rest of us don’t even exist, because democracy to them is majority RULE by them and them alone

Remember Scotland is paid 43% short of it’s own money that’s around 20 billion quid per year, deficit? what deficit? the English deficit that’s what, and they still have to borrow money and assign a percentage of that debt to us that England spends on ?????

Anybody heard on the National News bulletins what the people of Scotland Wales or N Ireland think of Brexit?

No,,,me neither.

Latest news says Corbyn will call a vote of No Confidence in the Tory Gov next week if T May is getting a rough time and this will be an attempt to force a GE.

Get the popcorn in – things may be about to take off.

Mind you. I widnae put it past the Tories to whip everyone to support Treeza through this vote and then stab her in the back, figuratively speaking.

And in the middle of this (t)Ruthless is about to give birth and widnae be able to campaign…

Abulhaq Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India and South Africa too on some measures are part of the Anglosphere too but while the Commonwealth is a useful forum to bring them together even Brexiteers acknowledge the British Empire is history.

Germany of course runs the EU and the Eurozone in all but name, as Greece and Italy have discovered

I wish we had real journalists in Scotland and the wider UK that actually contextualise and analyse what actually is going on, but we don’t, but in Ireland they do. I’m posting the whole article because it’s simply so refreshing to read a piece of journalism that reads like a proper piece of well written journalism, ‘reporting’ of events and circumstances that took place and isn’t full of opinions ‘about’ what took place:

‘Tony Connelly
Europe Editor RTE

In the game of Jenga, competitors build a tower of identical wooden bricks, creating a new layer each time by deftly removing one block from below and placing it delicately on top.

The higher the tower rises, the more unstable it becomes, and the more skill is required to extract each new brick without bringing the whole structure down.

This aptly describes Theresa May’s Brexit strategy. Salzburg may well prove to be the clumsily extricated brick.

Since the Chequers paper was published in July, both London and Brussels have engaged in a dubious pretence. Theresa May pretended Chequers would allow the UK to maintain frictionless trade with Europe, avoid a hard border in Ireland, and permit free trade deals around the world.

The EU pretended that Chequers might work – or at least, officials and leaders were careful not to slap it down immediately or completely.

It’s important to remember the context of the Chequers publication. In July, Theresa May was barely surviving week-to-week; Tory hardliners were circling; her foreign secretary and Brexit secretary resigned along with a handful of junior ministers; the government was forced into voting for a slew of amendments which contradicted its own strategy.

One of those amendments rendered the Irish backstop virtually illegal.

The EU looked on helplessly. Member states even decided to suppress a set of European Commission Task Force slides that spelled out in stark detail the cost to the EU over time of allowing the UK to go its own way on services, yet stay aligned to the single market for goods and agriculture – one of the planks of Chequers.

This was done expressly to give Mrs May a helping hand. She barely clung on till the summer recess, but there was a hope that after the summer break, fresher minds might prevail as we headed to the autumn showdown.

But summer came and went and the Tory dynamic was back with a vengeance. Local conservative associations were up in arms over Chequers. Boris Johnson was throwing down weekly gauntlets as his stock among the grassroots rose.

By late August, the British press was convinced that Salzburg would be a pivotal moment. Theresa May would appeal to EU leaders over the head of the doctrinaire Michel Barnier and they would change the chief negotiator’s mandate to give her a deal on the backstop and Chequers.

British diplomats worked the capitals, attempting to peel member states away from the Task Force. Briefing against Ireland’s position on the backstop continued.

All this was viewed with bafflement in Brussels. Downing Street was also worried that that expectations were being unduly raised.

Salzburg was the first time the EU27 would meet Theresa May since Chequers was published. Officials close to the negotiations predicted leaders would carefully calibrate their position. They didn’t want to kill Chequers, but they wanted also to deliver unambiguous support for Ireland.

By Thursday afternoon, the entire charade appeared to have been blown to smithereens.

At a news conference Donald Tusk, the European Council president, seemed to tire of the pretence. He said: “We should not hide the obvious truth. [The Chequers plan] will not work… There are positive elements in the Chequers proposal but the suggested framework for economic co-operation will not work, not least because it risks undermining the single market.”

The French President Emmanuel Macron also dismissed the economic parts of the Chequers proposal, and then sharpened the knife with an ad hominem attack on Brexiteers. “Brexit is the choice of the British people… pushed by those who predicted easy solutions… Those people are liars,” he said.

In London there was a cascade of negative headlines: “humiliation”, “catastrophe”, “ambush”, “fury”. The Sun newspaper, which has denounced Chequers relentlessly from the start, decided that any criticism from EU leaders made them mobsters, under the banner headline “EU Dirty Rats”.

Downing Street officials were stunned at Mr Tusk’s intervention. London wondered if this was a deliberate, if high-risk, “Darkest Hour” strategy by which, in a nod to the recent Churchill film, Britain would have to be forced into a crucible of torment in order to finally do a deal.

Some sources wondered was it a miscalculation, or an accidental ramping up of rhetoric. But President Tusk had also tightened the deadline for a deal on the backstop. Unless there was significant progress by the October summit then he would not call a summit in mid-November.

That seemed a harbinger to no deal.

In contrast to the fear and loathing in London, there was thinly disguised amazement in Brussels at the British reaction.

“We never said Salzburg would be a game changer,” says one EU diplomat. “That we would dump our line on the backstop, or that we would suddenly think the economic part of Chequers was workable.

“We never hinted at that at any moment.”

So what happened in Salzburg? Who tugged at the wrong wooden brick?

Sources suggest that Theresa May got off to a bad start. The Prime Minister was to make her pitch on Chequers and the backstop at a dinner in the Felsenreitschule Amphitheatre the night before the summit.

However, EU leaders were dismayed at what they saw as an aggressive tone, presaged in her article in the German newspaper Die Welt.

Her message was: ‘we’ve moved, now you have to move too’. And she flatly rejected Michel Barnier’s efforts to “de-dramatise” any checks along the Irish Sea by reducing physical checks at GB ports to just one category of goods, with technology and pre-clearance handling the remainder.

“It’s not that she was turning up as a leader,” observes one source, “saying to her colleagues, ‘look, I have a major political hurdle here. We all want a deal, but I have a couple of difficulties, can we find common ground on certain issues that are of high concern?’

“That was not the message. The message was, I moved, that was Chequers, that’s it. And I cannot accept a border on the Irish Sea.”

“That is not very conducive to getting people to say: ‘perhaps we should reflect on how we could get further here’.”

Yet, the following morning the Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker described her presentation to reporters at the Mozart University: “It was interesting, it was polite, it was not aggressive. She is doing her job.”

As Mr Juncker was speaking Theresa May and Leo Varadkar were holding a bilateral meeting with teams of officials and diplomats at the Sheraton Grand Hotel five minutes walk away.

An Irish source described it as a “useful” meeting, involving an “open exchange of views”. Another source present described the encounter as “warm”.

Dublin felt that London had to get deeper into the detail of how the backstop would work – how it would be legally operable and all-weather.

Mrs May told Mr Varadkar that she didn’t think she could reach agreement on the backstop before the October European Council meeting. She said she would bring forward new proposals shortly to try to break the deadlock.

In Dublin, Simon Coveney was meeting David Lidington, the deputy prime minister. It was, according to London, a “sensible” meeting. There was no inkling of what was about to happen in Salzburg.

Meanwhile, other leaders were arriving at the summit.

Most said the UK needed to move on the backstop, but acknowledged that Chequers had some merit. During the Article 50 gathering, when leaders met without Theresa May, Michel Barnier outlined in detail his reworked plans for the backstop, but he also praised Chequers.

“On Chequers he was extremely nuanced,” says one EU source. “He said there are many areas of convergence on which we can work and where we can find common ground. But, he said, the hard [economic] core of it is not workable.

“It was very comprehensible. People had no reason to think we should depart from this approach.”

But does that explain the yawning chasm in perception, with “catastrophe” at the British end of the spectrum, and “what-did-she-expect” at the other end?

Diplomats from more than one EU member state insist there was no pre-meditated ambush.

EU officials had clearly indicated in advance of Salzburg that Mr Tusk would work up three themes: a declaration of unity, support for Ireland, and a look ahead to work on the political declaration on the future relationship that will accompany the Withdrawal Agreement.

The issue of timing also came up. While there had been rampant speculation that the deadline for a deal was shifting to mid-November, France in particular was pushing for October.

“There was a view, certainly among the French,” says one EU diplomat, “that we should big up October, because if we big up November, then you just make a rod for your own back down the road, because suddenly the EU gets put under pressure.”

That, of course, would mean Ireland also coming under pressure.

According to another source, this was the main point of discussion between Donald Tusk and Theresa May when they held a short meeting after the Article 50 lunch.

British sources described the encounter as “frank”. There were reports Mrs May left angry and unsettled. An EU source described the meeting as “sociable”.

“It was a short meeting,” said the source. “They were extremely surprised by the emphasis that was now being placed on October, but that was the dynamic in the room. That was not an ambush.”

It is hard not to avoid the conclusion, therefore, that Salzburg was another example, of which there have been many, of a florid mismatch in expectation and perception on either side of the Channel.

This was exacerbated by familiar pattern: an exaggerated expectation within the British system and media about the importance of Salzburg, Theresa May’s posture ahead of it, and the attempts to bypass the Task Force and go direct to heads of government.

“The elements coming together are disparate,” says one EU diplomat, “but to a large extent the British brought this on themselves. To the extent that Salzburg was being presented as a great liberation of the process from the clammy cold hands of the ideologues of the Commission bureaucrats – that was never going to happen.”

It is undeniable that Donald Tusk’s language in his news conference was blunt. But in the post-Chequers period, neither he, nor other EU leaders, or countless officials, have made any secret of the fact that the economic and customs elements of Chequers were deeply problematic.

The problem is that, whether deliberate or not, Mr Tusk’s intervention threw the notoriously short-termist Downing Street machine into defence mode.

With the party conference imminent, there were few options available to Mrs May other than to present herself in her Downing Street statement as tough and angry, doubling down on the ambush narrative, and casting Salzburg in existential and emotive terms.

She accused the EU of showing her a lack of respect. The EU wanted to “break up our country”. She seemed to imply the EU wanted her to overturn the referendum result (the EU has never taken that position). She accused President Tusk of not explaining why the Chequers plan would undermine the single market (in fact, Michel Barnier has spoken non-stop about how Chequers would undermine the single market).

The EU was only offering two alternatives: that of a rule-taker under a Norway plus model, or a Canada-style free trade agreement which would necessitate a backstop.

Neither, she said, were acceptable. Yet, the EU has said Britain’s own red lines are the very things that predetermine those outcomes.

But the uncompromising language on the backstop must be a concern. Theresa May has reinforced the constitutional threat idea, and getting down from that position will be difficult. One Dublin source hopes the speech is merely a “play-within-a-play”, scripted for purely domestic consumption.

Ironically, the Salzburg “catastrophe” was not primarily about the backstop, and the chemistry with Leo Varadkar was better than it had been.

Dublin now awaits the new proposals on the backstop, which I understand will cover not just regulatory checks – as some have suggested – but the whole gamut of checks that the backstop will give rise to.

Irish officials are, however, suspicious that the new proposals will be a repackaging of the demand for the backstop to be UK-wide.

But the backstop and Chequers are, of course, intimately linked.

One key reason why EU leaders had been careful not to trash Chequers during the summer is that the White Paper posited the UK more closely to the EU’s regulatory and customs orbit than the visions outlined in Theresa May’s Lancaster House speech.

Even if the economic and customs ideas within Chequers were never going to fly, they altered the trajectory of Brexit from Lancaster House, through the Mansion House speech, and on to a landing zone which could be worked towards, not in October or November, but two years down the line.

Eurosceptics realised this, of course, and that is why they hated it so much.

That landing zone was not fully defined, but a closer customs and regulatory symbiosis between the UK and EU beckoned. Time could have allowed it to materialise.

For Theresa May it was to provide her with cover in order to reassure unionists that the backstop would not ever be needed, because Chequers would inform the future trade relationship in such a way as to remove the need for customs or regulatory checks either on the land border, or down the Irish Sea.

It would also allow her to reassure the business community that highly valuable supply chains would be protected.

While both sides tacitly understood this formulation, there was a critical difference: the EU regarded Chequers as a pseudo-option, a virtual solution that might help close off the Withdrawal Agreement and then guide everyone into the trade negotiations where, over time, the UK would settle for a softer Brexit.

Theresa May saw it as a literal solution.

In Salzburg the virtual met the literal, and the Jenga tower collapsed.’

link to rte.ie

Painting the outside of my house, so I went into my local plant hire company and asked for a cherry picker, got handed a picture of Treeeza.

HYFUD what’s your point?

While not engaging, I correct Hi Ya Fud’s factual errors.

On Pensions.

Ireland’s male pension as a percentage of average earnings, while lower than the OECD’s average is 42% (OECD 2016).
The UK’s male percentage of average earnings is 29%, the second lowest, to South Africa, among OECD countries.

Also note that GDP per capita for Ireland is significantly higher for Ireland than the UK. So that has to be factored in as well.

Germany is 51% and France is 75%.

Yesindyref2
Martin geisler has consistently ran down Scottish Independence as he us a regular attendee on bbc shereen show. The fact you met him hasnt changed that. Middle class person living comfortably.im alright Jack.

Collie No you did not make your points at all as I have comprehensively refuted them both.

Of course your main point, that England alone is dragging all the other Home Nations out of the EU against their will, falls at the first hurdle as Wales also voted Leave. So your attempt to play the anti English card there is completely illogical

Very nice, Chris, very nice. I see three split personalities, and none of the characters depicted friends to Scotland.

Your essential weekend reading:

A Letter from the Clearances: link to wp.me
A review of ‘Black Klansman’: link to wp.me

Hamish100 Currency values fluctuate, that is not a real measure of pension value which is more percentage of average salary. Plus of course a low £ is good for UK exporters and the UK tourism industry, it is not solely a negative

Lol Thpnr.

*Went intae a shop
Boy said, all cakes a £1
Ah said, can a get that one?
He said, that’s £2
Ah said, £2?
He said, aye that’s Madiera cake

*this wee joke has fuck all to do with anything 🙂

(jammies oan…aff tae ma kip)

?dl=0

ScottieDog I agree Irish GDP per capita is inflated by Apple, Amazon, Facebook etc basing themselves there due to very low corporation tax for instance in the Republic of Ireland.

Iceland introduced more austerity than the UK, Spain or Portugal or Ireland did, Iceland is also outside the EU and is still prosperous now

Thepnr & K1
As aye was going to St Ive’s
Aye met a man with 7 wives
Each wife had 7 sacks
Each sack had 7 cats
Each cat had 7 kits
Kits, cats, sacks and wife’s
Thank fuck there no aw going to St Ive’s

Hi Ya Fud
Barclay’s clandestinely had a bigger bail out than HBOS and RBS(the then biggest world bank) combined. Fact.

Hey Murdo explain the Laffer curve to us
then I’ll explain another curve to you and how the Internet works both ways