Sunday 16 October 2016

Banging their heads against the glass window of reality

The previous week was a shameful one in British politics, when the Conservatives embraced nationalism, anti-immigration, intolerance and repatriation of even EU nationals. It was horrific. THe backlash from those with the exception of the Right Wing parts of Fleet Street were strong and swift, not that those self same papers and even the BBC reported it much.

Also on the agenda from Amber Rudd was collecting the names of all foreign born workings and then naming and shaming those firms that employed too high proportions of non-Brits. Or mudbloods if that makes if feel more like fiction.

The Government had to back track on this, and is busy meeting with multi-national companies like Nissan trying to assure them that there would be money for compensation if Britain were to leave the EU and Single Market. Is that was the savings were going to be spent, bribing companies not to leave? It seems that there is a scheme of creating a series of bonded warehouses which would not be part of Britain, but would be in the EU, or something, and there have been leaks of forms already on how to apply to create such a building.

This week the People's Campaign reached court with one day of submissions thus far, and the action resumes on Monday. But already the Government's position has been undermined by the release of a submission to the Hosue fo Lords declaring that Parliament should have the final say after a referendum. Oops indeed.

You really could not make this up.

And so on a daily basis, the Brexiteers and those tasked with delivering the impossible tie themselves in knots in declaring that in order to reclaim sovereignty, the sovereignty of Parliament must be ignored, as the people's will must be respected. Splits in the ranks of the Conservative benches are already showing, and with the appointment of Kier Starmer as Shadow Brexit Minister has meant that there is a semblance of an opposition once more. He published a list of 170 questions (one for each day until the end of March when the PM is supposed to trigger Article 50). That David Davis, one of the three Brexiteers tried to dismiss it as a "stunt", we can think of a word rhyming with stunt that comes to mind when we think of David Davis.

Parliament had a chance to have its voice on Brexit after PMQs, during which Corbyn actually landed some serious blows on the PM. During the debate, serious questions were asked, none of which were answered, and that most of the difficulties were coming from the Tory benches shows that getting any legislation through either Houses is going to be difficult, but then as clearly Davis, Fox knows next to nothing what they are doing, and are being shown up on a weekly basis, maybe scrutiny would be best, only the Government thinks otherwise.

Its all interesting for sure, and many miles yet to run.

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