This timeline sucks, part the Nth

[selenak]

The Turkish Minister of foreign affairs claims Individual 1 has promised to extradite Gülen to Turkey. While anything the Erdogan government claims, especially re: the attempted coup, is worth some scepticism, I could believe this one, since the Orange Menace loves autocrats and never understood all the bother raised a bit of torture there and prison for one's political enemies here. Maybe he'll send a bone saw along with Gülen.


If US politics have taken on a Tarantino flair, then British politics... honestly, I don't know what to compare them to anymore. Spitting Image, back in the 80s? Seems like understated hardcore realism by comparison. Ivan Rogers, who was the UK's representative to the EU until recently, dissected all the Brexit delusions in this great speech given in Liverpool. Choice quote:

It still amazes me that virtually the entire British political class still thinks that it’s free movement obsessions are about to be shared in the 27. They aren’t.

BUT…. once you leave the EU, you cannot, from just outside the fence, achieve all the benefits you got just inside it.

First, there will, under NO circumstances, be frictionless trade when outside the Single Market and Customs Union. Frictionless trade comes with free movement. And with the European Court of Justice. More later on that.

Second, voluntary alignment from outside – even where that makes sense or is just inevitable – does NOT deliver all the benefits of membership. Because, unlike members you are not subject to the adjudication and enforcement machinery to which all members are.

And that’s what Brexiteers wanted, right? British laws and British Courts.

Fine. But then market access into what is now their market, governed by supranational laws and Courts of which you are no longer part – and not, as it used to be, yours – is worse and more limited than before.

That is unavoidable. It is not, vindictive, voluntary, a punishment beating, or any of the other nonsense we hear daily. It is just ineluctable reality.

And finally, the solidarity of the club members will ALWAYS be with each other, not with you. We have seen that over the backstop issue over the last 18 months. The 26 supported Dublin, not London. They still do. Nothing the Prime Minister now bids for will change that.

This may be the first Anglo-Irish negotiation in history where the greater leverage is not on London’s side of the table. And the vituperation aimed at Dublin politicians tells one just how well that has gone down with politicians and apparatchiks who had not bothered to work out that this was no longer a bilateral business, and are now appalled to find they are cornered.

Well, just wait till the trade negotiations. The solidarity of the remaining Member States will be with the major fishing Member States, not with the U.K. The solidarity will be with Spain, not the U.K., when Madrid makes Gibraltar-related demands in the trade negotiation endgame. The solidarity will be with Cyprus when it says it wants to avoid precedents which might be applied to Turkey.

I could go on.


The point re: this being the first Anglo-Irish negotiation in history where the Irish have the greater leverage was realised by the Irish long before the UK, it seems: How Ireland outmaneuvered Britain on Brexit is an article devoted to this aspect in particular. Back to Ivan Rogers dissecting Brexit: he does so in a bipartisan way, no more impressed by Labour's leadership than he is with the Tories:

And even yesterday morning I listened to a Shadow Cabinet Member promising, with a straight face, that, even after a General Election, there would be time for Labour to negotiate a completely different deal – INCLUDING a full trade deal, which would replicate all the advantages of the Single Market and Customs Union. And all before March 30th. I assume they haven’t yet stopped laughing in Brussels.


If they haven't, it's only because watching people you used to respect and like commit self mutilatation is actually a painful business. Do I ever prefer fiction to reality. It just makes more sense.


Even if it's so surreal and bewildering like the tv show Legion. versaphile wrote this great glimpse at Lenny and David post Season 2 finale: All Good In The Head Now?

And here are two excellent meta posts by the same writer: Why Mr. Darcy keeps being misread as a Bad Boy Reformed (which isn't his trope), and Why the Borgias got their image as worst of the worst in the Renaissance, when objectively speaking they were no more (or less) corrupt than the rest of their contemporaries, including the families who managed to get members on the papal throne.

Comments

[versaphile]

Ohh thank you for the rec!! What a lovely surprise ❤️

[selenak]

You're welcome, I loved the story.

[falena]

Thanks for the Brexit speech link. It gave me some food for thought.

[petra]

I read this, on scroll-past, as US politics taking on a Temeraire flair. I'd like that better than the present.

[selenak]

On the one hand, who wouldn't, on the other, can you imagine Individual 1 with Dragons at his disposal?!? ("I have the biggest dragon. The biggliest.") One shudders to think.

[ratcreature]

This autumn when I was on vacation in Wales I chatted with a British guy, and I think even at that point he absolutely wasn't clear that Brexit would actually come with practical consequences. IIRC I had off-handedly mentioned that I had decided to come then because it post-Brexit everything would just be more complicated, and he asked what I meant, because surely it wouldn't much matter for vacations, and I said that I assumed I would need to worry about roaming charges again for example, after all even with Switzerland you get that problem, and also the EU health insurance equivalence wouldn't apply so I would need travel insurance etc. And he was kind of baffled and said that he'd hoped things like new roaming consumer rules would just continue as they were. Then I was "..."

[selenak]

It really is incredible how many people simply didn't - and still don't - seem to get the point about consequences. Or that all those conveniences they like have something to do with being in the EU. Head. Desk.

[ratcreature]

Yeah. I mean I don't know how or even whether he voted, because I wasn't actually trying to discuss politics, but had just talked about hiking vacations in youth hostels and good destinations we had been to and such. I don't think he was passionate about it either way, and seemed to be indifferent to the whole thing. Obviously none of the discussion that had reached him had made it really relevant or concrete to him.

[lilacsigil]

Yeah, even though my country (and even more so farming areas like the one I live in) is likely to do very well out of Brexit, it's just so horrible and downright embarrassing to watch.

[jesuswasbatman]

The two things which underly all Sir Ivan's points and were too obvious to his audience to spell out are, firstly, the continued delusion among practically the entire British population, even many of the more left-wing ones, that we are a Great Power and that all other countries in the world are naturally supplicants to us, and second, the depth of "the wogs begin at Calais" British xenophobia. (The second, incidentally, is why practically all left-wing US essays on Brexit I've read are deeply confused, because it can't be understood in the context of the US anti-racist dogma that, because of international white privilege as a legacy of colonialism, ethnic/cultural bigotry between different groups of people who qualify as "white" in the US cannot possibly be relevant in the present day anywhere in the world, and anyone who suggests that it is must be denying or trying to distract from Actual Racism. And no, in relation to the most common counter-argument, British hostility to central and eastern European immigrants is not solely anti-Roma prejudice, even though that is present.)

And the Labour Party response to Brexit is horribly disappointing as well, because as I see it there's a combined effect from, a) Blair-Brown era style fear of challenging the prejudices of the White Working Class, and b) Corbyn and others tending to left opposition to the EU, which used to be primarily limited to Corbyn's generation but has had something of a revival in recent years because of the EU enforcing economic austerity on Greece et al.

But unlike the FBPE crowd on Twitter who tend to be ferociously anti-Corbyn Labour-right sympathisers, I don't think a Labour Party led by any of the non-Corbyn candidates would have been able to campaign for Remain more effectively in the referendum or to oppose Brexit more effectively afterwards. Because a big part of the reason why we had the rise of UKIP and then Brexit is the belief of the Labour Right leadership of the party under Blair and Brown that the White Working Class were somehow naturally and unchallengably racist and xenophobic, and that the best they could do was try to avoid discussing EU migration while being repugnantly cruel to non-white migrants, especially refugees, pandering to Islamophobia and wider bigot complaints about established non-Anglo-Saxon people "not integrating", and making regular genuflections to the "legitimate concerns" of working-class bigots. And when they did try to defend EU free movement during the referendum, the most they could do, due to their inability to argue for migration as a moral good, was to produce unenthusiastic economic arguments that just confirmed the belief of bigoted members of the White Working Class that EU migrants were the reason for low pay, unemployment, and housing shortages, and that the only people on the left who supported free movement were smug, hypocritical "drawing-room socialists" (I believe that's the literal translation of the German term) who approved of it because they got cheap Eastern European cleaning women (for women) or prostitutes (for men) and some new fashionable styles of ethnic restaurant.

[selenak]

I used to think, a few years ago, you were exaggareting a bit about British xenophobia. I have since learned better, of course.

Re: Labour (old, new, etc.): Given how thoroughly Tony Blair has discredited himself with all the factions by his own actions, it‘s bitterly ironic that he‘s one one of the few big name Labour politicians consitently speaking anti Brexit. Then again: haven‘t all living former PMs come out anti Brexit? (With John Major being especially scathing.)

[jesuswasbatman]

Unfortunately, Blair's also taken the opportunity to start reiterating that the main lesson of this is that we must take note of the Legitimate Concerns of the White Working Class about immigration.

[anghraine]

Thank you very much!

[selenak]

Thank you for these great posts!